Re: physics

From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Fri 06 Dec 2002 - 19:49:06 GMT

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    > > 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
    >
    What spooky action at a distance refers to is action that cannot be causally connected, i.e. that efffected action that takes place so quickly after a purported causal action and at such a great distance that light would not have a chance to move between them, in other words, a
    (Einsteinianly impossible) superluminal causal connection.
    >
    >
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