Re: Awesum mind powerz!!!

: lmh@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Larry M Headlund)
: I wouldn't say its akin to the go north at the north pole, which is a
: a consequence of definitions, with out possibility of alternatives.
: It happens that the speed of light is invariant for observers. It could
: have been different, but it isn't.

Yabut... the implications which *keep* you from going faster than
light are due to *defining* lightspeed frame invariant; and while this
seems to be so in the real world, it also seemed to be so in the real
world that gravitational acceleration was exactly inverse square.

Not that I'm wildly disagreeing with you or anything.
But the "barrier" as an absolute limit is what you get when you model
real observations with specific definitions. If instead you model it
as, oh, an interaction with a subether with particles of such-and-such
a teeny tiny subatomic/subquark size in a galilean-invariant geometry,
you might find that when you get rillyrilly close to lightspeed with a
large object you cause a shockwave in those particles which blah, blah,
blah, and could be detected. That seems very *very* unlikely nowdays,
but only very unlikely in 1940. I think, mostly.

And if, when we got to the north pole, the shape there had made for
a convenient definition in which "northwards" continued, oh, maybe,
"upwards" when you got close enough to where the pole would have
been... shrug. In any event, north has that property because we
abstractly treat earth as a sphere; we *could* have discovered that it
isn't nearly-spherical near the poles, or somesuchthing.

On the other hand... yes, the analogy is shakey.
But captured most of what I was getting at, namely, that it isn't
a powerful force that pushes you away from the pole, proportional
to 1/distance. There's nothing strange there at all (if, of course,
we ignore the candycane marker and Santa's workshop), just as there's
nothing strange when you "approach lightspeed"; you're still standing
still, same as always.


Wayne Throop throopw@xxxxxxxxx http://sheol.org/throopw
.

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