There's some physics forums I lurk and occasionally post in, and every time the discussion goes beyond physics, holy shit are their opinions dumb as fuck. Just getting someone to understand a simple point that anyone could understand with like 2 sentences just feels like wading through mud with them because every time anything seems to challenge one of their preconceived opinions at all (or if they just don't understand it because they're out of touch) they get annoyed, and then they fixate on irrelevant parts of your point until you have to explain that part of your point again and again and again, and then everyone forgets what it was even about. Especially the boomers in there.
Then there's the ones "helping" people, who will basically act like they are doing a MASSIVE courtesy to you by explaining things, so they'll put people through the shredder for misunderstanding something or for phrasing the question in a way that isn't absolutely perfectly 100% crystal clear as if their compiler is giving an error or something.
And it's not just people in forums, like almost all the professors I know are also just complete morons about anything even slightly unrelated to their specialty.
Why are science nerds like that, I fucking hate it. Like holy shit grow up >:(
Christopher Caudwell is the antithesis to this. Check out “The Crisis in Physics” or listen to Cosmopod’s episode about him.
All the good ones die young (by fascists) :(
I'll check him out.
I’m just a science enthusiast, not a scientist, but I think Caudwell presents a bunch of interesting questions which might even vex specialists. (Off the top of my head, he calls photons “waves of nothing” and claims that nothing in physics makes sense because all motion is relative—there is no point in the universe that is holding still which we could use to measure the movement of objects. I am holding still in relation to my couch but moving really fast in relation to the sun, which means that f=ma depends on context and can vary enormously. If anyone wants to explain why I am wrong here, please do so.)
If you feel like paraphrasing him in those forums and then reporting back on the STEMlord reaction, I’d be interested in seeing it.
What you are explaining probably isn't wrong but it's also not Caudwell's idea, it's basically orthodoxy post-Einstein that there is only relative motion (although acceleration isn't relative interestingly enough but it's kind of a confusing and complex subject). I'm not sure what you mean by "nothing", I'd have to see how it is defined, but since his time there has been development in our understanding of photons and particles in general so he might be working on an antiquated model, but he also may have a point, I'll have to see. What he might be describing is that in quantum mechanics there is little concept of something having a trajectory or being somewhere in most interpretations. So he might be saying that they're not waves localized somewhere and going somewhere else as if they are spreading through a medium, which is a typical understanding of them in QM although QFT complicates things further.
Ah okay, cool. Caudwell I believe calls photons “waves of nothing” because they have no mass and do not appear to move through a medium. When he was writing, I think the luminiferous ether was a little more fresh in physicists’ minds than today.
True, when he was writing there were still a lot of people who preferred the idea of a luminiferous aether and yeah, what you're saying sounds closer to the modern conception of photons.
I'm pretty sure he doesn't believe photons are "waves through nothing" and was using the phrase as a means to explain the mysteriousness that the luminiferous ether had at the time. He eventually reaches the conclusion that as a thing entirely unknowable (the absolute velocity/absolute length being unknowable quantities) it eventually reached the point where we could claim the ether didn't exist. The most antiquated thing I remember in the first chapters was his use of relative mass which I don't believe is used anymore, as we used invarient mass when I took physics in college. When I looked up what the difference was between relative and invariant mass it seems that if we use relativistic mass you must do calculations for and assume both a longitudinal mass and transverse relativistic mass versus using just an invariant mass which would result in a simpler calculation with the same results. I just reached the point where the chapters no longer have titles, but I've been reading the same book haha.
I have a copy, it's pretty interesting. I'd love to see a physicist and philosophy of science person rewrite it/finish it, cleaning up the parts that are no longer true/anachronistic. I'm more of a computer science theory person though. I only took a a few courses, and am in a graduate quantum computing class but am bad at it.