Kevin said: > 6. Most people who have never studied physics would be unlikely to > pontificate on the subject. Most people who have never studied > economics > not only will pontificate on the subject, but will explain to you in > terms that suggest you are an idiot, why they are right and you are > wrong. That they are unqualified will never occur to them.
Sadly, there are a large number of people who will do just that. For example, a few years ago I wrote an article on faster-than-light communication and causality in special relativity in which I showed as clearly as I know how that the existence of a communication system whose signal is instantaneous in the frame of a transmitter and receiver that are at rest with respect to each other can be used to violate causality. This is an unambiguous prediction of special relativity, and is a special case of a more general violation of causality by faster-than-light communication in the theory. Furthermore, it doesn't rely on anything except the two postulates of special relativity. (General relativity doesn't change the prediction; it just makes the demonstration more difficult.) Nevertheless, the article spawned an interminable comment thread in which I've repeatedly been accused of being an idiot on the basis of other people's intuition about how time must be. Unfortunately, special relativity has been supported (in the form of quantum field theory, which combines special relativity with quantum mechanics) to something like one part in 10^14 whereas the vague intuitions of non-physicists about time and causality are presumably on less secure footing. You can see the whole train wreck at http://www.theculture.org/rich/sharpblue/archives/000089.html Rich _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
