Re: The first postulate is a truism.

On 2025-06-29 04:20:02 +0000, Thomas Heger said:

Am Samstag000028, 28.06.2025 um 19:18 schrieb Athel Cornish-Bowden:

On 2025-06-28 16:22:06 +0000, Thomas Heger said:
 

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 Well, that's what you think.
 For me it seems, that Heaviside and Gibbs were 'con-artists' and wanted to divert physics from true science.
...

 I don't know enough about Heaviside to comment on what you say about him (though my guess is that it's complete bollocks to rival the complete bollocks that you write on other subjects). For Gibbs, however, it's clear that you don't know the first thing about Gibbs's character. A good place to start would be the Wikiparticle on Gibbs, but there is plenty to be learned from other sources.
 

 My guess was, that Gibbs and Heaviside cooperated in the attempt to eliminate quaternions.

Instead of guessing, why not try to find out?

 My guess was, that they knew, that nature would require something like quaternions and complex numbers, but wanted to divert mankind from good science.

Instead of guessing, why not try to find out?

 Iow: they knew better science than what they told to the general public, but didn't want that general public to interfere with their hidden knowledge.

Gibbs didn't address the general public.

 So the extremely stupid concept of additive connections between 'forces' was introduced and that was meant to eliminate ideas about 'ether', too.
 People like Tait and Hertz rejected this concept, but were simply overrun by the vector hype, which is still the dominant paradigm.
  TH

--
Athel -- French and British, living in Marseilles for 38 years; mainly in England until 1987.