Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: electricity



At 07:26 PM 8/9/01 -0400, Meredith, Justin wrote:
it was Albert Einstein who said "energy cannot be created or
destroyed".

Did he really say that? Why should he get the attribution, when Clausius
had come to the same conclusion decades earlier?

i assume he is a trustworthy person on this subject.

Einstein would have found such an endorsement quite bizarre. He abhorred
blind obedience to authority, and was fond of reminding people that
questions about physics are not settled by appealing to some "trustworthy"
authority. Rather they are settled by appeal to experiment, and to
meticulous logic.
http://www.time.com/time/time100/poc/magazine/a_brief_history_of_rela6d.html

Experimental evidence and logical reasoning are conspicuously absent from
this thread.

there is A LOT about life and physics in general that we don't know.

True enough.

i don't
see why it is bizarre to spit out theories and ideas about unproven
subjects,

Here's why: "theories" consisting merely of juxtaposition of ill-understood
ideas never produce useful results. Most people already know this. The
hypothetical "syllogism" that states
-- we don't understand charge, and
-- we don't understand energy, so therefore
-- charge must consist of energy
is so bizarre that words like "illogical" and "unscientific" and "useless"
and "clueless" barely begin to describe it.

In fact we do know a thing or two about charge, and we do know a thing or
two about energy, and in particular we know more than enough to support the
conclusion that charge is not a form of energy, nor vice versa.

Whenever somebody asks an ill-posed question, I try to guess what was the
underlying real-world that motivated it. But this thread is so deeply
submerged in the miasma of idle speculation that I don't know where to begin.

One does not begin the learning process by "spitting out" vaporous
theories. One begins by learning a few well-known facts. The number of
possible theories that can exist in the absence of facts is infinite, and
it is a colossal waste of time to discuss them. One simply must know a few
facts before beginning to theorize, in order to keep the number of
hypotheses under control. It also helps to know the procedures for
distinguishing a valid logical inference from an invalid one.

Feynman's book _The Character of Physical Law_ might be a good place to start.