From: Dace (edace@earthlink.net)
Date: Fri 06 Dec 2002 - 06:06:12 GMT
> From: Wade Smith <wade_smith@harvard.edu>
>
> On Wednesday, December 4, 2002, at 01:41 PM, Dace wrote:
>
> > [Derek]
> > agreed with me that we can't simply discount, a priori, the
> > possibility of
> > action-at-a-distance applying to biology as well as physics.
>
> Not much to disagree with there, I suppose, as 'simply
> discounting' anything is, in most cases, errantly assumptive.
>
> But, is not 'action-at-a-distance' still only a figment of some physics?
>
> - - Wade, who is not a physicist but does seem to recall some
> Bohr-ing comments about this somewhere.
Action-at-a-distance has been a mainstay of physics for 300 years. Newton
didn't much like the idea, but he couldn't think of any other way of
accounting for gravity. No one much liked Faraday's notion of
electromagnetism, since it also required action-at-a-distance, but once
Maxwell proved it mathematically, it was universally accepted, so to speak.
Early in the 20th century the Michelson-Morley experiment exposed the
concept of "ether" as unscientific. The revelation that there's no material
medium on which waves of light propagate across the cosmos led directly to
Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity.
Ted
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