Re: [Tears] Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

On Sun, 30 Jun 2024 16:00:28 -0000 (UTC), Don <g@crcomp.net> wrote:

In regards to Berkeley's Relativity, the Wikipedia article you cite is a
hot mess. Something about Berkeley's attitude seems to anger both
Bacon's Royal Society of London and Wikipedia. Here's Berkeley's
pertinent thoughts on Relativity:
>
   Absolute Space and Motion
>
   Absolute motion and absolute space are not understood
   realistically or instrumentally by Berkeley. He recommends
   that natural philosophers dismiss the concepts. Relative
   space and motion will more than adequately serve the
   purposes of physics. The debate about absolute motion and
   space has a long and complex history. Berkeley’s critique
   is often regarded as an anticipation of that of Ernest Mach.
>
   <https://iep.utm.edu/george-berkeley-philosophy-of-science/>
>
Berkeley's Relativity anticipated Einstein's Relativity, in other words.
This topic was last broached by me in rec.arts.sf.written about a decade
ago. And at least one regular back then acted insulted and promised to
have the last word on Wikipedia. ROTFLMAO.

That classical mechanics doesn't distinguish between states of
constant motion is well known. But what I recall from the standard
textbooks I was exposed to is that knowledge of this fact was credited
to Newton himself.

Einstein's achievement was to put together such partial insights as
Lorentz contraction to show that relativity, the equivalence of all
inertial frames of motions, could _still_ be the case after Maxwell's
equations were added to physics. No one from the distant past could
have anticipated _that_ until after Maxwell's equations existed.

John Savard