(Apologies for cross posting) Hi All,
The Foundations of Physics seminar series (http://bit.ly/SydFop) gets up and running again for a new semester next week, Wednesday the 1st of September at 11:30am in the philosophy common room, Main Quad. Our first speaker will be Graham Nerlich on "Bell's 'Lorentzian Pedagogy' - a bad education". Merely that JS Bell wrote "How to teach special relativity" ensures an interest in the paper. But it has become an icon of a particular philosophy of special relativity, constructivism, championed mainly by Harvey Brown and Oliver Pooley. Brown makes the depth of the issues clear ". a moving rod contracts and a moving clock dilates because of how it is made up and not because of the nature of its spatio-temporal environment. Bell was surely right." [his emphasis]. I claim that Bell was surely wrong for largely philosophical reasons so that Brown, Pooley et al. are confused, too, about utterly basic issues. A bit of actual physics, about acceleration in SR, gets into the act as well. Hope to see you all on Wednesday, Pete --- Peter Evans Centre for Time University of Sydney
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