Halc wrote:Aww... The glimmer went out. I see no hope of a common language.
Yes, I think you're right.
One problem, in my opinion, is that David falls into the trap that lots of people fall into when talking about time. It's the trap of misusing temporal language and, as a result, making statements and asking questions that contradict themselves, use words to mean different things in the same sentence, are vague, make no sense or don't contain the relevant information. In everyday speech, about everyday human-scale events, we can normally get away with this kind of thing. It's no big deal. We muddle through. But when discussing these kinds of topics in physics we can't be so casual. We have to say precisely what we mean and we have to be clear as to how our words link (either directly or indirectly) to something that can be measured/observed. That's why, when trying to be as precise as possible, mathematics is used instead of English. But the mathematics is dry, hard to follow and (not being used everyday by most of us) easily forgotten. I know I've forgotten most of it! I certainly couldn't conduct a conversation about physics entirely using it.
I tried to start showing David some of these issues with temporal language by pointing this out:
Steve3007 wrote:"while" = at the same time.
Time is the thing that is measured by clocks.
viewtopic.php?p=320312#p320312
The trouble is, when it comes down to explicitly showing David where his words are failing like this, he seems to try to pull an analogous trick to the one that he does with "underlying reality". He seems almost to suggest that, when they're explicitly pointed out, the contradictions in his words don't matter (and that anyone who disagrees is merely playing word games, seeking to distract, concentrating on the wrong thing, scared to admit what a fool they are, falling for a dogma etc) and that what matters is the underlying David, and that what we can see in his words will never truly show us what the underlying David means, no matter how much we analyse those words. But, rest assured, the underlying David is right about everything!
A small illustration:
David Cooper wrote:In the underlying reality...
(1) clock A can tick faster than clock B while clock B ticks faster than clock A.
(2) clock A cannot tick faster than clock B while clock B ticks faster than clock A.
Pick one of those options if you're a serious participant in the conversation.
A similar approach to the one used in his online quiz. "Make the binary (yes or no, 1 or 2) choice that I set in front of you or be thrown out." As I said a long time ago, it's a version of the classic "have you stopped beating your wife yet? Yes or no?" fallacy.
So, as I said "while" is a synonym for "at the same time" or "simultaneously". So whenever the temporal word "while" is used, we can replace it with one of those terms (with appropriate adjustments for grammar) without changing the meaning.
For example, if I say "I am drinking while driving" that is the same as saying "I am drinking at the same
time that I am driving" or "I am simultaneously drinking and driving". It means the same thing.
And since time is a thing that is measured by a clock, in order to tie that sentence to something that can be measured (and therefore render it meaningful to the empirical subject of physics) we need to either explicitly or implicitly say how we might propose to empirically test the proposition that those two events are simultaneous in time. "Time as measured by whose clock?" we have to ask. Obviously in the everyday surface-of-the-Earth world, with its everyday statements about such events as drink-driving, it's all unthinkingly implicit. So time for most purposes can be thought of as a single "underlying" thing (so-called "Newtonian time") that all clocks aspire to measure. It is, as it were, a Platonic ideal of which their readings are deemed to be mere imperfect reflections. This appears to be very much David's view of the world. He'd love Plato's parable of the Csve, I suspect.
So now, keeping all of this in mind we can try to make sense of the options David claims to have given us above. It seems reasonably clear now that those two options contain implicit premises. One implicit premise is that there is a third clock (which I'll call clock E) implied by his two uses of the word "while". Another is that there is a third observer (whom I'll call observer E) who is holding that clock and receiving signals from clocks A and B so he can give us his judgement as to which is measured to be ticking faster. But, of course, that judgement will depend on the relative movements of A, B and E. So, for example, the first option (with the premise made explicit) is:
"(1) If observer E is stationary WRT to reference frame E and uses clock E to measure the tick-rates of clocks A and B, can he/she measure a tick-rate which disagrees with the measurements made by A and B?"
Yes, of course they can all measure different relative tick rates depending on their relative motions.
When we make the language explicit, and tie it to that which can be measured, we see that the problem with David's language here is essentially the same as the problem when he incorrectly says, elsewhere, that reference frame A somehow implicitly asserts itself to also be frame E, but no other frame. Obviously that's not true. If I say "I am stationary in the reference frame represented by the marks on the inside of the chassis of my car" I am not, either explicitly or implicitly saying "...and I am also stationary WRT another reference frame in which the ether is stationary." Of course I'm not.
Of course, if I'm wrong to think that those premises are implied, then the true premises need to be made explicit in order to render the propositions meaningful enough to be susceptible to analysis. The precise sense in which the word "while" is being used needs to be explained.
But I suspect what I'll get instead is either "you have failed to pick an option therefore you are not a serious participant in this conversation" (i.e. I'll be thrown out for not giving a binary answer to a question with hidden premises) or I'll get another long diatribe which fails to address what I've actually said here, just goes on about his various models, and simply asserts, once again, self-evident falsehoods. So, returning full-circle to the start of this post: I don't think David and I will ever find a common language. But it's fun trying.