On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 10:24 PM, John Berry <berry.joh...@gmail.com> wrote:
If you want to believe it is settled science as many do, you are welcome to > do so. > But I question it because no one is able to answer some very important > questions such as how a photon can be explained to be C unless we are > closing in distance toward it and then the only answers I get seem to be > based on faith, in Einstein and scientific impartiality. > Which IMO you are not doing very well on. > When faced with a corner case in a system as subtle as special relativity, one has different options. If one has a sense of one's limits, one might conclude that the corner case is out in a region that extends beyond one's current understanding of the system. At this point, a competent person will either devote the time to understand the system in sufficient detail to get at the heart of the corner case, or one will delegate to other competent people and adopt what they explain as a working assumption. I do not intend right now to undertake a detailed study of special relativity, so I am instead happy to delegate to other competent people. Here is where trust becomes important -- only delegate to people you trust, or you will be given bad information upon which to base your working assumptions. On a scale of 1-5, I give the people at physics.stackexchange.com a 4 in terms of the confidence I have in their ability to understand the corner cases in special relativity that have been discussed up to now. By contrast, I give anyone who appears to be struggling with the basics of logical reasoning, such as starting from a well-known hypothesis, a 1 -- I would not trust them to be able to effectively sort out the corner case. I am happy with the people I have chosen to delegate out to on the matter of special relativity. This is not faith-based reasoning. It's a step that any person who has a sense of one's limits would do. The main reason I do not delegate out to the physics.stackexchange.compeople on the matter of cold fusion is that I detect a bias in their approach to the manner that has clouded their judgment and prevented them from adequately looking at the experimental evidence for cold fusion. Given the bias I perceive in their approach, I am practically forced to look into the matter myself, which I am happy to try to do. Eric
