Re: AETHER / OR

From: robert j. kolker (nowhere_at_nowhere.net)
Date: 12/28/04 

Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2004 09:48:05 -0500

harry wrote:

>
> Do you really want to know that? If so, why first read the writings of
> unknown people who may be just repeating stuff they don't know about?
> Are you sure that you know the theory of Newton? Did you know that
> Newton rejected the "aether" concept of his time but nevertheless
> inferred something in space that he called *absolute space* on which he
> based his *laws of relative motion*, so that many people here would
> have called him a crank because they don't understand his logic? Did
> you know that the Lorentz transformations come from Lorentz'
> unification of Newton's theory with that of Maxwell?

Actually that was Einstein who dunnit.

> It's a bad idea to think that one can learn science by only reading
> textbooks that are meant to drill engineers in manipulating equations,
> or only from crank literature, or even from just discussing with
> engineers in newsgroups. You will learn more if you go straight to the
> original sources - much you can find on internet nowadays, and happily
> you can find links to those from all such sources. I think that Newton,
> Lorentz and Einstein were smarter scientists than most people here.

Don't knock engineers. They actually DO things. And science is learned
in laboratories. Physics is empirical right down to the ground floor.
The only standard of quality for a physical theory that counts is
correctness of predictions. There is nothing else.

Bob Kolker

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