3 ms·

Einstein's discovery of relativity is something everybody takes for granted now, but think about how exceptionally ridiculous the notion that light travels at t

Einstein's discovery of relativity is something everybody takes for granted now, but think about how exceptionally ridiculous the notion that light travels at the same rate of speed from all perspectives is; or how the universe will bend over backwards, including having people 'advance through time' at different rates of speed or literally physically change the distance between things, in order to maintain this perception. It's like some sort of a simulation filled with spaghetti code, yet it's our real universe and has been as 'confirmed' as anything can be in science. But... imagine it wasn't. If you had a 'logical and normal' understanding of the universe, and heard of somebody researching something with these sort of implications, then a normal person would probably think they had simply lost their mind. Calling it just "weird" would be a dramatic understatement. We always have, and probably always will have, an arrogance of the present. It's explained by a tautology - what we think is right, is what we think is right. Or otherwise, we wouldn't think in such a way. Yet the entirety of human history shows that sooner or later, much if not most of what we think we know to be true, will be proven to be simply wrong. Sometimes it will be in the 'needs refinement' bucket, but much of it will also just end up in the completely and fundamentally wrong bucket. And the scientists willing to indulge 'weird science' are those who will take us there, because you're not just cleanly stepping from one branch to another A->B->C, but just completely scrapping the tree and starting with an entirely new root node.

mjburgess 3y ago
Einstein did not discover that the speed of light was fixed. This was a consequence of Maxwell's research on electromagnetism in the late 19th C. It is entirely reasonable for any physicist (indeed, Maxwell himself could've done it with enough time), to work through the consequences of a non-relativistic equation for the speed of light. This approach is routine in physics, and there's nothing in it that would appear crazy or unusual. Physicsts do not simply just pluck crazy ideas from their imagination and, from-nothing, deduce possible consequences. This is a myth, and insofar as people do that, they're cranks. The imagination of a phyiscist is heavily guided by the totality of physics that has been developed. Einstein did not simply say, "what if the speed of light was fixed?" He said, 'given we have good reasons to suppose it is, what are the concequences on relativity ?'
- emblaegh 3y ago
  > Einstein did not discover that the speed of light was fixed. This was a consequence of Maxwell's research on electromagnetism in the late 19th C. The principle of relativity, which what OP was talking about, cannot be derived from Maxwell's equations alone.
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    The speed of light in maxwell's eqns is non-relativistic. That is itself basically just the insight and founding principle of special relativity. The rest is just to work out how to revise relativity to account for non-relativistic velocities -- and this is fairly trivial at the special relativity level. More novel, from einstein, was GR but many insights here can be found "in the air" amongst professional physicists, in particular you could see GR as following from a formal elaboration of Mach's principle (itself, in many ways, just a reply to a thought experiment Netwon had made centuries earlier) The point is that "non-crank" physics doesnt have the crank-like "moments of genuis" that people assume. It isnt just plucking ideas from the air. Those ideas are heavily embeded in thousands of years of reflection
    - cma 3y ago
      Had anyone presaged the special relativity energy mass equation that would result?
      - Kranar 3y ago
        E = mc^2? No, that was absolutely novel. But special relativity? Yes, Henri Poincare had already come up with a mathematically equivalent theory to special relativity. Einstein's is a much simpler theory by all means, but the original commenter talking about it like it came out of no where and people must have thought Einstein was crazy or lost his mind, that's just a gross misunderstanding of history. If anything, Einstein's theory of special relativity gained acceptance rather quickly because it basically converged to where physics was already heading.
- 3y ago
passwordoops 3y ago
I agree it's the scientists who take us to weird places that advance the needle (and something that's discouraged in academia, but that's a different conversation). However there's a big difference between proposing something exceptionally ridiculous and fraud leading to retraction
spacecadet 3y ago
simulation filled with spaghetti code, typed out by our god and his noodley appendeges.
mistermann 3y ago
> We always have, and probably always will have, an arrogance of the present. It's explained by a tautology - what we think is right, is what we think is right. I think it's culture + semantics/semiotics. I see it occurring most frequently in the form "What is true, is what we believe (~'consensus') is true" (the word belief is usually not explicit though). In practice, the word "is" has multiple meanings, one of them being "[It is my opinion that] X is true", and pointing out the presence of the implicit opinion part is culturally unacceptable, depending on the scenario. It's a lack of cultural distinction between the universe and reality, they are typically conflated in this era, in our geographical region. Personally, I think LLM's offer some compelling insight into the process underlying this phenomenon, and I bet this can be proven out.

mjburgess 3y ago

Einstein did not discover that the speed of light was fixed. This was a consequence of Maxwell's research on electromagnetism in the late 19th C. It is entirely reasonable for any physicist (indeed, Maxwell himself could've done it with enough time), to work through the consequences of a non-relativistic equation for the speed of light. This approach is routine in physics, and there's nothing in it that would appear crazy or unusual. Physicsts do not simply just pluck crazy ideas from their imagination and, from-nothing, deduce possible consequences. This is a myth, and insofar as people do that, they're cranks. The imagination of a phyiscist is heavily guided by the totality of physics that has been developed. Einstein did not simply say, "what if the speed of light was fixed?" He said, 'given we have good reasons to suppose it is, what are the concequences on relativity ?'

emblaegh 3y ago
> Einstein did not discover that the speed of light was fixed. This was a consequence of Maxwell's research on electromagnetism in the late 19th C. The principle of relativity, which what OP was talking about, cannot be derived from Maxwell's equations alone.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  The speed of light in maxwell's eqns is non-relativistic. That is itself basically just the insight and founding principle of special relativity. The rest is just to work out how to revise relativity to account for non-relativistic velocities -- and this is fairly trivial at the special relativity level. More novel, from einstein, was GR but many insights here can be found "in the air" amongst professional physicists, in particular you could see GR as following from a formal elaboration of Mach's principle (itself, in many ways, just a reply to a thought experiment Netwon had made centuries earlier) The point is that "non-crank" physics doesnt have the crank-like "moments of genuis" that people assume. It isnt just plucking ideas from the air. Those ideas are heavily embeded in thousands of years of reflection
  - cma 3y ago
    Had anyone presaged the special relativity energy mass equation that would result?
    - Kranar 3y ago
      E = mc^2? No, that was absolutely novel. But special relativity? Yes, Henri Poincare had already come up with a mathematically equivalent theory to special relativity. Einstein's is a much simpler theory by all means, but the original commenter talking about it like it came out of no where and people must have thought Einstein was crazy or lost his mind, that's just a gross misunderstanding of history. If anything, Einstein's theory of special relativity gained acceptance rather quickly because it basically converged to where physics was already heading.
3y ago

passwordoops 3y ago

I agree it's the scientists who take us to weird places that advance the needle (and something that's discouraged in academia, but that's a different conversation). However there's a big difference between proposing something exceptionally ridiculous and fraud leading to retraction

spacecadet 3y ago

simulation filled with spaghetti code, typed out by our god and his noodley appendeges.

mistermann 3y ago

> We always have, and probably always will have, an arrogance of the present. It's explained by a tautology - what we think is right, is what we think is right. I think it's culture + semantics/semiotics. I see it occurring most frequently in the form "What is true, is what we believe (~'consensus') is true" (the word belief is usually not explicit though). In practice, the word "is" has multiple meanings, one of them being "[It is my opinion that] X is true", and pointing out the presence of the implicit opinion part is culturally unacceptable, depending on the scenario. It's a lack of cultural distinction between the universe and reality, they are typically conflated in this era, in our geographical region. Personally, I think LLM's offer some compelling insight into the process underlying this phenomenon, and I bet this can be proven out.