Re: YASID: Wizards turn out to be using gunpowder rather than magic

On 2/27/11 10:58 AM, Wayne Throop wrote:
::: The problem with relativity is the assertion that there is no way
::: to know what's really going on, so to speak.

:: Charts of the hyperbolic geometrical relationships *do* show what's
:: really going on.

: "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)"<seawasp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
: "charts" are not "looking at them from a location where I can see
: what's really going on";

Ah. I thought the idea was to understand, to "know what's really going
on", not to have magical time-vision with which to directly percieve
what's going on. My mistake. However, I will note that there are
space-only cases where it's also impossible or impractical to find a place
from which to physically, literally, see what's going on. Just saying.

The idea was to understand "what's really going on" IN THE SAME FASHION. That is, I understand what's going on with the bricks without ANY real intellectual process; my gut-level perceptions say "yeah, it's just the way I'm looking at them. They actually aren't changing".

No amount of analogy-waving can develop that (for me) for time, because I can't MOVE in time, LIVE in dimensions of time, the way that I do in space; I don't have an intimate (even if, just as with space, somewhat constrained) ability to travel in and manipulate the perspectives of that dimension. Aside from going to a really boring movie, in which time does indeed stretch out immensely.

It is intuitively obvious that objects have specific relationships, that while those relationships may LOOK different they don't actually CHANGE because you look at them from funny angles, and that simultanaeity isn't a matter of perspective; of COURSE time passes the same way everywhere. We rely on coordinating things to happen at the same time frequently through our lives, and have ever since we had to coordinate hunting parties, at least. There's no reason to think that just because you make the distances longer and longer that this changes, that saying "Gentlemen, start your engines" loses its simultaneous nature just because I'm coordinating a race between three participants in three different solar systems rather than in three different lanes.

Yet relativity and its relatives (ha!) state that indeed, there IS a difference -- or rather, that all such cases have the same problem, but the problem isn't really detectable by us in a small, slow-moving timespace scale. It tells us ridiculous things such as "If Joe accelerates at John, and John accelerates at joe, each starting from a point that was at rest with respect to each other, and Joe and John each reach a speed of .95C, Joe and John will see each other approaching at ..99+C.". This is blatant lunacy, since we know from personal experience that if we drive two cars towards each other at the same speed, the closing speed seen by an outside observer OR either of the inside observers is precisely the sum of the two vehicles' speeds.

Studies of the real world show that relativity is correct, of course, and our gut instincts on this are wrong, but that doesn't change the feeling -- at least for me -- that it's RELATIVITY that's wrong.

Well, yes and no. I agree you've put your finger on a big chunk of my
difficulty, but I expect there's also some more basic misunderstanding
about what it means to "understand" temporal relationships.

I mean, I agree they can't be directly perceived. I agree that humans
haven't got hard wiring to model the world that way, and that human
perceptions have an internal model nearly like euclidean geometry
(but not quite spot-on). But given that there's a trivial map between
relativistic relationships and euclidean geometry which we *are* nearly
hard-wired to percieve, it doesn't really seem to be quite the blockade
to understanding yielding total alienation that you describe.

See the -- far simpler -- example of the ToH problems previously. It's been demonstrated numerous times that while most people can easily and intuitively grasp the classic ToH problem, most people find the Monster-Globe problem VASTLY harder, and never find it intuitive.


Hence my
conclusion that there's something about your use of "understanding"
that I'm misunderstanding.

I think you're missing the fact that I separate "understand" in the sense I understand how to pick up and perceive a brick, from "understand" in the sense of "I know how to push the numbers around to get the answers and determine (for instance) how much apparent time elapses for Twin One". The latter, like abstract art, I accept exists and that some people can just glance at and make sense of in some fashion, but is utterly opaque to me except on the purely intellectual level; no emotional or intuitive grasp, I have no idea what will happen in ANOTHER relativistic problem without going back and crunching the numbers (or, better, asking someone else to do it who DOES understand it well); at best I can get a very vague handwavy idea but it will as likely as not be wrong.


--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Website: http://www.grandcentralarena.com Blog: http://seawasp.livejournal.com

.

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