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Re: pressure at an intangible boundary



on 3/12/02 11:13 AM, Bernard Cleyet at anngeorg@PACBELL.NET wrote:

Seems to me that if one has dyed water green, then in pouring the green water
out of a pitcher, one has flowing green.
I would say we had flowing green water

Momentum is moving mass (forget about E-M momentum for
now); no problem; momentum flows.
Moving mass?
Surely it's more properly a moving object that has p[roperties of mass and
of velocity, among other properties.
So, I would say the object moves, nothing flows.

This is an old and rather intractable topic on this list, but let me make
the case for anti-reification once again.

Flow surely means moving along in a stream, as a liquid.
This meaning could be, and is, extended the idea of proceeding continuously
and smoothly, like a stream, as "flow of thought" or "flow of speech".
To jump from here to "flow of a particular property of a substance" is quite
a leap. When this leap is made in teaching at introductory levels from
primary school through secondary school to freshman classes it will almost
certainly carrying with it the conception of energy as a substance, as a
kind of liquid.

Brian McInnes