-1- wrote: ↑Sat Nov 25, 2017 2:48 pmI checked it out. (I did not read the text -- too much separation, it's like reading a list, instead of reading a story. A story maaaaybe I can read; lists are definitely out.) But I am not saying that your effort was a list -- only that it gave the impression of one. And that was enough to turn me off.
Fair enough; it won't suit everyone.
-1- wrote: ↑Sat Nov 25, 2017 2:48 pmOn the other hand, the visuals were impressive. Well chosen, and delightful. They were beautiful.
Thank you.
-1- wrote: ↑Sat Nov 25, 2017 2:48 pmI can't attest to the contents. Since reading it was beyond what I am capable of.
The idea was to write the book I wish I could have read when I was 15. Asterix and Tintin, mostly, so that's the format I pinched.
-1- wrote: ↑Sat Nov 25, 2017 2:48 pmNice work. Did Emmy and Issy read it? And did they respond in a way that made you think they "got" it?
Yes, but they're my daughters and were perhaps being polite.
-1- wrote: ↑Sat Nov 25, 2017 2:48 pmI ask because teaching relativity theory without the student's fundamental understanding what really happens is futile.
That's exactly what I am trying to address. Relativity does not explain "what really happens"; it is a bunch of mathematical formulae that accounts for the data and predicts future observations. That is not to deny, or even belittle it in the slightest; relativity theory is a work of genius and does its job extremely well. Which is all the more remarkable, given that special and general relativity are based on antithetical premises: special relativity is based on the assumption that spacetime is a void; whereas general relativity treats it as a 'fabric' that can be warped and twisted.
-1- wrote: ↑Sat Nov 25, 2017 2:48 pmSure, they will learn the surprising differences between our expectations and what actually happens... but if they don't understand it, then these remain curiosities, oddities, and perplexing anomalies to our daily expectations. And indeed to understand relativity you first must down the oddities, then work through the math, and finally MAAAABBBE get the picture of what's really happening. 99.9 percent of the population will never achieve that, no matter how much they study and how much they apply the math and memorize the oddities.
99.9% will never understand the maths behind hydrodynamics, but anyone can turn on a tap and see what actually happens. The problem, in my view, is that some people don't understand that mathematical models, no matter how accurate, do not necessarily describe actual events. The obvious example is Ptolemy's geocentric model of the universe, which accounts for the phenomena surprisingly well, given that the physical model, on which it is based, is total bollocks. You can see people tying themselves in knots, for instance, trying to account for time dilation while mistaking the observations for reality, or treating one inertial frame as privileged. The same is true of spatial dilation; people, even some physicists, insist that because moving objects appear different sizes, they have actually shrunk. Whack a Lorentz transformation on to an object that is, in fact the size it appears to be and, whoops-a-daisy, it should now appear even shorter.
-1- wrote: ↑Sat Nov 25, 2017 2:48 pmSo to expect of a child to make sense of this is, in my opinion, a bit too much. Newtonian physics is more appropriate to introduce children and wives to physics with, because the concepts are at-hand, self-evident, transparent, and comply with human intuition.
Well, in terms of cosmology, you're talking about absolute and infinite space, absolute time, instantaneous transmission of gravitational influence, a god that occasionally stirs things to keep it all running smoothly and the claim that "whatever is not deduc’d from the phænomena, is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy."
https://newtonprojectca.files.wordpress ... tte-a4.pdf -1- wrote: ↑Sat Nov 25, 2017 2:48 pmAnd teaching relativity is a child's play compared to teaching concepts and math of quantum theory.
Yeah, the maths of QM is tricky, but again, what makes the concepts confusing is mistaking the map for the territory. Quantum field theories have some scary sums in them, but the basic concept is simple enough: There's some field of influence, the strength of which we can measure by observing the behaviour of detectable particles in it. However, we can't see the field directly, unless we hit it hard enough to knock a lump off.
-1- wrote: ↑Sat Nov 25, 2017 2:48 pmI would stay away from popularizing physics at this deep level.
Mad dogs and Englishmen...
-1- wrote: ↑Sat Nov 25, 2017 2:48 pmThe best one can expect as a result of it is a bunch of dilettante thinkers, such as myself, arguing on physics and philosophy forums what oddity means what, saying the biggest stupid things, without any correspondence to the findings of the fields or to the theory behind it.
Well, there's the ones who are puzzled, sometimes because they have been misinformed, and there's the ones who are not puzzled, usually because they have their own bat-shit theory.
-1- wrote: ↑Sat Nov 25, 2017 2:48 pmOf course you have the freedom of speech, and whatever, blah blah blah, but your story may be scarier to young children than stories of krampus or of the devil or of giant space-goats that eat planets, roaming the universe. You see, as I see it, children up to 28 years of age need for their sense of security a stability of a world view. This is one huge attraction behind religion -- its tenets and dogmas are tailor-made for humans...
By humans. Cause and effect.
-1- wrote: ↑Sat Nov 25, 2017 2:48 pm...they are not counter-intuitive...
Depends on your intuitions.
-1- wrote: ↑Sat Nov 25, 2017 2:48 pm...they are very believable...
They are very widely believed, but I don't think they are intrinsically believable, or everyone would believe all of them.
-1- wrote: ↑Sat Nov 25, 2017 2:48 pm...and they don't deny your reality. They work with your reality. So does Newtonian physics, but relativity and QM turn more people into trembling cowards than running out into the battle field and slashing the enemy at a high risk that the person will himself or herself will be slashed.
Well, Newtonian physics works with the 'reality' of absolute time and space, neither of which are 'real'.
-1- wrote: ↑Sat Nov 25, 2017 2:48 pmIn summary: as a guiding motive, but not restricted to this only very example: it is more humanly negotiable by the mind to imagine to be cut up into little pieces than to realize that the material the human is made up of is incredibly small, with huge spaces in-between them, which are not even sure to exist, only in the sense of a statistical probability. THIS they should not show to little children.
I dunno. It's no more crazy that tooth fairies. Maybe I'll write a book for little children: 'Tim the atom' or something.