Re: Old Tea Leaf Reviews 6: 1986 Locus Poll Best First Novel

On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:37:02 GMT, throopw@xxxxxxxxx (Wayne Throop)
wrote:

That turns out not to be the case.
"There's" your drives *square*-of-speed, which is not a speed.
I'm sorry if you hadn't heard, but "speed" is not "just a number",
ie, not a unitless number. Squaring a speed doesn't get you a speed.
Never did, never will.

Further, even if you decide to ignore that fact, the fact that you can
*decide* on the results you want, by deciding on the units you want
to use, should clue you in to the fact that you aren't actually saying
anything when you say "the speed is the square of the speed oflight".

You might think that if you are just explicit, and say "the speed is the
square of the speed of light in farquads per bleen", but in that case
while you've maybe escaped being numerically vacuous, you're still just
being self-contradictory since farquads-squared per bleen-squared isn't
a speed.

That's just the way it is. Numbers that have units are not "just
numbers".

To illustrate further: you say your spacedrive goes the square of the
speed of light. Oh, I say, 1 light year per year squared, eh? That's,
erm, let me check my numbers ... 1 light year per year (or, actually,
1 ly2 per y2 but you know where I'm going) ... not much faster than
the speed of light, hmmm.

Worse, perhaps you are really measuring speed of light as parsecs per
year, and at least the person claiming they have a drive that goes the
square of the speed of light is less likely to be lying or violating
relativity. (Ignoring, again, the squaring of units thing.)

.

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