Hi Elephant, Rick,
Rick observes that your analogy "confuses the measure (law of
gravity and clock) with the measured (gravity and time) and thus appears
absurd when you draw it to the conclusion that you do."
The only reasonable conclusions that can be drawn from the clock argument
are:
My new alarm clock uses the same conventions for measuring time as my
grandmother's clock built in 1850, and grandma's watch must be a fine
timepiece if it still works as well as a new one.
ELEPHANT:
I've recently bought an alarm clock.
It tells the time.
I have a french clock from 1850 that I inherited from my grandmother
It also tells the time.
The old clock and the new clock are (nearly) in accord.
Therefore:
My new alarm clock is the *very same clock as* my grandmother's clock built
in 1850.
I think that takes care of that variation.
For this to be a good analogy, you have to come up with something that is
more similar to gravity than clocks. To justify by analogy that your
argument is effective in throwing mine into doubt, you have to show that
it's nearly as easy to tell gravities apart as it is to tell clocks apart.
While it's common knowledge that there are billions of different clocks,
created by people at different times throughout human history, it's not so
obvious that more than one gravity ever existed, created at different
times in the history of the universe (much less by humans).
GLENN:
> 4) your argument shows that two clocks are in accord in the present. You
> didn't show that the clock, as it ran in 1850, was in accord with the one you
> recently purchased. My argument effectively sees back in time and makes a case
> that gravity was behaving in accord with Newton's law at different junctures
> in history.
ELEPHANT:
No. You didn't simply claim that the universe was behaving "in accord with"
gravity before newton - because that's a claim I have absolutely no trouble
with. What you argued was that "gravity itself" existed before newton. Now
that's the claim that I've been arguing against, and the clock business is
an argument against your support for that claim. In fact, the preamble to
that clock argument was the really important part of my last posting on this
thread - the bit where I argued that it didn't make sense to talk about
observing gravity itself in the ancient galaxy, but rather more sense to
talk of observing that an ancient galaxy that was *in accord with* gravity.
You seem to have agreed to that bit, given your interest in the clocks
business and your use of my vocab ("accord"). I have to say that, from your
point of view, this is a mistake. If you are to challenge my argument
anywhere, it would have to be at this point. The appositeness of the clocks
analogy follows directly on the assumption that what we observe is
concordance with gravity. Which you appear to accept. You therefore have
absolutely no justification for your thought that observing concordance
between clocks is any different from obseving concordance between the world
and a physical law.
What makes my argument persuasive is that the the spiral shape suggests the
same law is at work, and the law of gravity is bound up in gravity itself.
It seems reasonable to expect that a different gravity would operate by a
different law, and yet we don't see a different law.
The law of gravity is the only property of gravity we know. If different
gravities operated by the same law, they would be indistinguishable and so
there wouldn't be much value in believing them to be different.
The clock argument is not persuasive because there are many different
properties of clocks, and you are not limited to the property of their
"accord in what time they tell" to discriminate one from another.
Glenn
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