Comment on Justifiable Erroneous Scientific Pessimism

Fri, 10 May 2013 16:54:52 GMT

Is that correct? Spinning implies rotation implies acceleration, which I'd always thought could be detected without external reference points.

This is addressed later in the article, very well IMHO. Let me just give the relevant excerpts:

If you tried to visualize [the entire universe moving together], it seems like you can imagine it. If the universe is standing still, then you imagine a little swirly cloud of galaxies standing still. If the whole universe is moving left, then you imagine the little swirly cloud moving left across your field of vision until it passes out of sight.

But then, ... you can't always trust your imagination. [...]

Suppose that you pick an arbitrary but uniform (x, y, z, t) coordinate system. [... Y]ou might say:

"Since there's no way of figuring out where the origin is by looking at the laws of physics, the origin must not really exist! There is no (0, 0, 0, 0) point floating out in space somewhere!"

Which is to say: There is just no fact of the matter as to where the origin "really" is. [...]

[...]

And now—it seems—we understand how we have been misled, by trying to visualize "the whole universe moving left", ... The seeming absolute background, the origin relative to which the universe was moving, was in the underlying neurology we used to visualize it!

But there is no origin!

Discuss