Cotan Theta wrote:
wrote in message
oups.com...
Hello All,
....

A FEW YEARS BACK
A few years back, while surfing a towering wave on the Outer Banks of
North Carolina, a beautiful thought occurred to me. Suppose the wave I
was riding represented a coordinate in a dimension. Then although I was
approaching shore, I was not moving in this dimension.

In other words, you imagined yourself "at rest" in a frame of reference
"moving" with respect to a reference frame fixed to the shore.
Obviously, introductory physics classes are not getting this simple
idea across to students (an idea first stated by Galileo!).
Congratulations: you've accomplished one of the first basic concepts of
kinematics.

Now, to what degree does the world appear the same or different as
viewed from the surfboard (wave) frame compared to the shore frame? Can
these differences best be attributed to happenstance or to some
fundamental difference between the two frames's absolute motions?