🚀 go-pugleaf

Tom Roberts <tjroberts@lucent.com> wrote in message news:<bolknd$kbl@netnews.proxy.lucent.com>...
> Dio wrote:
> > Why does relativity interest so many people? I think that QM is more
> > interesting and that has upset our space time knowledge. Nevertheless
> > relativity interests people.
> 
> Fundamental theories of physics are IMHO intrinsically interesting.
> 
> Around here, I think there is another effect going on: SR is clearly 
> counterintuitive to people not experienced in applying it, and yet the 
> underlying math is simple enough that all too many people delude 
> themselves into thinking they understand where SR "went wrong". To those 
> of us who are experienced in applying SR, it is quite clear that 100% of 
> the people around here who claim SR is "flawed" really do not understand 
> SR, and it is their personal understanding that is flawed, not SR itself.
> 
> 	Of course NONE of them will admit this, because their personal
> 	lack of understanding includes the inability to understand where
> 	they themselves went wrong (:-().
> 
> 
> For Quantum Mechanics, on the other hand, the underlying mathematics 
> (operators on Hilbert space) is so complicated that nobody can easily 
> delude themselves that they understand it.
> 
> I agree that QM is incredibly interesting, and requires a much more 
> fundamental change in our perception of the world than does SR, or even GR.
> 
> 
> Tom Roberts	tjroberts@lucent.com
EZ: I think that there are some pretty interesting parts of Special
Relativity. These are: Tachyons, causality, flat space-time with
dimension
greater than 4, and time reversed waves. Also, I found the four
dimensional
Euclidean space-time with metric (+,+,+,+) to be interesting. I think
that
it is OK to push the theoretical envelope of Special Relatvity but I
don't think that anyone is going to succeed in showing it to be
seriously flawed.

General Relativity is interesting because of the all the interesting
gravity
related phenomena like black holes, wormholes, gravity waves, and
cosmology
models. The alternative theories of gravity are also interesting and
Yilmaz
is my favorite. It removes singularities and event horizons but
retains the
predictions of GR for bending of starlight, red-shift, mercury's
perihelion shift and the radar echo time delay.

Quantum Mechanics is also very interesting because it challenges our
very concept of reality. Nick Herbert discusses this in his book
called Quantum
Reality. 

I find that most of the physicists who are deeply interested in
relativity (special or general theory) are also interested in quantum
mechanics and visa
versa.

Regards. 
Ed