The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 13.1983  Thursday, 26 September 2002

[1]     From:   John Briggs <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
        Date:   Wednesday, 25 Sep 2002 16:49:39 +0100
        Subj:   Re: SHK 13.1964 Re: The Supernatural and Modernity

[2]     From:   H. David Friedberg <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
        Date:   Wednesday, 25 Sep 2002 13:21:20 -0400
        Subj:   Re: SHK 13.1964 Re: The Supernatural and Modernity

[3]     From:   R. Schmeeckle <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
        Date:   Wednesday, 25 Sep 2002 10:33:27 -0700 (PDT)
        Subj:   Re: SHK 13.1964 Re: The Supernatural and Modernity

[4]     From:   R. Schmeeckle <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
        Date:   Wednesday, 25 Sep 2002 10:52:54 -0700 (PDT)
        Subj:   Re: SHK 13.1964 Re: The Supernatural and Modernity


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           John Briggs <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date:           Wednesday, 25 Sep 2002 16:49:39 +0100
Subject: 13.1964 Re: The Supernatural and Modernity
Comment:        Re: SHK 13.1964 Re: The Supernatural and Modernity

If you really want a non-mathematical exposition of Special Relativity,
you can't do better than the sequence in the film "Insignificance"
(1985) where The Actress (Theresa Russell as Marilyn Monroe)
demonstrates it to The Professor (Michel Emil as Albert Einstein).  In
his play "Hapgood", Tom Stoppard gives the relativistic explanation
(prediction) of antimatter.

John Briggs

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           H. David Friedberg <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date:           Wednesday, 25 Sep 2002 13:21:20 -0400
Subject: 13.1964 Re: The Supernatural and Modernity
Comment:        Re: SHK 13.1964 Re: The Supernatural and Modernity

>Does that mean that if you and I, standing, say, at the goal lines of a
>football field, turn on our flashlights at precisely the same instant,
>the light from each of us will reach the other at the same time that it
>reaches an object standing on the fifty-yard line?  Or is it the case
>that the effective speed of each beam relative to the other is not c but
>2c?  Another way to pose the question is to ask whether the speed of
>light is a "thing," in the sense in which I think Bill Godshalk was
>using the word when he proposed that all things in the material universe
>are relative to all other things.
>
>Reically,
>Dave Evett

I tried to explain this to Bill Godshalk off list for what I thought
were good reasons

The speed of light in vacuo is c relative to everything and nothing,
including another beam of light.  So in Dave Evett's example the
effective speed of each beam relative to each other is still c
Explaining that paradox was Einstein's second contribution to the world
in 1905.  The first, for which he won the Nobel Prize was in explaining
the quantum nature of light and the photoelectric effect Light exists as
quanta or packets called photons, which are things. They are massless
but carry energy which is equivalent to mass.  Curiouser and Curiouser
said a mathematician called Dodgson aka  Lewis Carroll

And as JBS Haldane said, the Universe is a queerer that you imagine, and
it is queerer than you can imagine But don     

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