"Bilge" wrote in message
...
Daniel Weston:
To Bilge: I think your point is well taken.
I think my point is well taken also. Every profession, when speaking
within itself and to itself, anthropomorphizes abstractions. However
most of the discussions on this NG, are not between
professional scientists. It is oftentimes between one skilled in
standard relativity such as yourself, and a novice in relativity, such
as myself.

Well, the proper comment is not, "the math can't cause anything".
The proper comment is, "I don't see how the math represents the
physics it describes". Then the response won't be sarcastic, but
frankly that type of comment has worn thin.

When a prof in class is instructing students, and a student asks, "what
is the cause of gravity?", and the professor answers, "the curvature of
spacetime", we have problems.

I don't see why. That is the starting point to understanding what
the underlying physics is.

The student is not degreed in physics, is not familiar with in house
jargon, and could be quite misled by such an answer.

I don't think the answer is misleading.

Good profs are quite aware of this communication problem, and are
skilled
in surmounting it. If he were totally honest he would say, "at this
time
we don't know, we are working on it."

I don't think that would be honest, because the best theory of
gravity we have states specifically that gravity _is_ explained by
curvature. The first fallacy in your argument, is that you think
some reason exists to postulate that spacetime is flat by nature
and something is necessary to "curve" it. Why shouldn't the opposite
be true, i.e., why should it not be intrinsically curved and require
something to "flatten" it, thereby making the curvature nothing more
than the most natural way for spacetime to be and "flat" then would
be rather unnatural, and therefore, not what we observe?

On this NG, and especially in popular science books, the curvature of
spacetime and the 4th dimension are materialized or anthropomorphisized
in a misleading way.

On this newsgroup, anything has a chance of being presented in a
way which is totally perverse.

As Patrick Reany has correctly pointed out, relativity theory is a
principle theory, and to a large extent a priori. The magnificence of
relativity is that it works, not that it explains itself, or came from
experiments that led directly to its math.
Neither its math, nor names given to certain parts of its math, (4th
dimension) are operable factors in the universe.

The math is not what general relativity is about and what is the
problem with taking time as a fourth dimension? Nature did what
nature did.

Writing "See, e.g., Johnson v. De Grandy, 512 U. S. 997, 1011-1012,
1020-1021" doesn't say anything about the legal principles contained
in the decision, but you can't condense pages of reasoning into
a sentence. The same is true with general relativity or physics
in general. It wouldn't be out of the ordinary to spend an hour or
several hours filling in the steps between two consecutive equations
in a textbook. How easy do you think it is to explain what one
learns by doing so? There _is_ a lot of physics that goes into
the mathematics.

Relativity doesn't really "describe" the universe.

Why not?

There are much better words to use than "describe".

Like what?

Relativity's math _quantifies_ many aspects of the universe.

But the math is not relativity. Relativity is a theory about how
nature works. The math is the way the theory is quantified into
a precise formalism that can be used to see if the theory is correct.


No it [is] a theory, and the math is a precisely formalized description of
the "theory," therefore of course the theory is correct--regarding the
theory alone, or standalone. The map may be a lousy description of the
territory, fundamentally wrong in detail, but a painting you might not mind
hanging on your wall as a fine, elegant, rendering of distortion and
caricature of reality (ergo, fantasy). Many "painter-observers" have that
individual 'viewpoint' of reality. They share it in common and call it the
"true reality" though it has nothing to do with obviousness, clarity,
wisdom, or common sense.

Take the expansion of the universe for example. The arrow of time in it
does not point away from Big Bang Creation state but right to it as ultimate
horizon. Expansion both from and to the same Big Bang Creation state, both
the past and future state of the universe, the past-future state, the
endless beginning state, as a fundamentally constant state, the 'present'
state of, of "time."

Opposing is the contraction state, what can be termed the "world state,"
or better yet, "shrinking world" state. The end state. Also a "time" state.
Now two states existing, opposing, therefore a third state existing between
and outside the two radically opposed 'radical' states. The third state
being what I might term, for purposes of picturing, a stable-steady-state
infinity of "space frontier" ("space frontiers"): This (these) being what
Stephen Hawking termed "the life zone"--though he didn't describe it well
enough, rightly enough, for many get the right picture of the 'territory' in
mind. It's taken me ten years from the time of reading him to realize
rightly what, so badly, he was trying to describe.

One has to ask, about curvature, how large or small the curvature? You see
in "spacetime" curvature, the straightest line is string theory's so-called
inertialless "wormhole," or inertialless "quantum tunnel," between any two
points. And I, and at least one other, have exampled a straight line in
space and time many times. In "spacetime" the longest distance between two
points is really in and through the curve. The greater the curve, the longer
the distance in and through the curve. You see, in spacetime, the curve is
"inertial." Less curve to the curve, less inertia in and through the curve.
Least curvature possible, straightest line possible, least inertia possible
in and through the straightest line curve. The greater the curve to the
curve, the greater the inertia in and through the curve. Most curvature
possible, most inertia possible in and through the curve. Thus the shortest
distance possible between two points is in straightest line-least curvature
(least inertia).

Brad