usenet weirdness

My comment was also a joke.

But was it an intentional one?

Another table tells me that there are 5280 feet to the mile,

Jan

-The- are not. Your particular one, of a sudden, massive sea level rise is. (by glaciologists in bad need of more funding)

Those living at the time will hardly have noticed, if at all. The catastrophes that really happened, the Storegga slides for example, had little to do with sea level rise.

Jan

Then how could you know that 'the Greek philosophers' (whoever) usually got the wrong end?

Jan

Yes, you are completely wrong about that. There is nothing to derive or predict there.

Boltzmann's constant tells you about what units you are using, and nothing else. It is as fundamental as there being 12 inches to the foot,

Jan

Real physicists understand what are real physical constants, like \alpha for example, and which constants are meaningless, like c, because they you tell one about what units you are using.

Not necessarily nutjobs, just people who don't understand what they are talking about. If they persist in their errors they become nutjobs, outside their speciality. (I have known some electrical engineers...)

Ernst Mach was a serious physicist only in a limited domain. For the rest he was a lousy philosopher of science. (inventing what is now called 'naive positivism')

His bad philosophy of science seriously flawed his understanding of physics in general. Planck already made mincemeat of him.

According to Mach, atoms are just a theoretical conveniences without 'real' existence. Hence, according to Mach, Avogadro's number, and Bolzmann's constant, are arbitrary numbers that can be given any convenient value.

From about 1900 onwards many people invented methods for determining Avogadro's number experimentalltally. It was the convergence of different results, obtained independently by different methods, to results roughly in the same ballpark that convinced the physics community that atoms are really real, and hence Mach wrong. As for Einstein, he played a minor, but significant part in all this,

Jan

-- "Aber haben Sie Eine gesehen?" (Mach)

For sudden, read a couple of hundred years, and look at the end of the last ice age, and the fact that the Gulf Stream got turned off for about 1300 years at the end of the last ice - the Younger Dryas.

The changes in climate would have been quite dramatic enough and quite fast enough to rate as catastrophic - business as usual would not have been an option.

Think again, or think a bit harder.

The flooding of the Black Sea, which happened at much the same time, did have more to do with sea level rise. It seems to have been spread over a couple of hundred years, and people would definitely have noticed.

I've read quite a bit of the history, and historians do enjoy pointing it out. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and Greek philosophy occurred long enough ago to have been exposed to quite a lot of it.

The exact numerical value of c has mattered to me from time to time. Being human, I have to measure things in units, and transform that measured distance into a propagation delay.

Pretty much every scientist is expert in a limited domain

Pontificating outside your area of expertise is always a temptation.

Max Planck initially thought that his quantised energy was just such a theoretical convenience,

He did get around.

Good for you that c has an exact numerical value, these days.

There is nothing but a propagation delay. Length is by definition measured in (nano)seconds. Anyone who thinks different is fooling himself.

Of course, but not all of them know their limits.

Pontificating is one thing. Nasty philosophers of science, like Mach, or Popper wanted to be prescriptive, so telling others how science must be done to be correct.

Yes, but he was soon cured of that by Ehrenfest, who proved that Planck's trick was not only sufficient, but also necessary to arrive at the black body law. And of course there was also Einstein 1905.

Certainly, he was already well known before 1905, and he became a major player after that year.

Jan

Eh, an -experienced- catastrophe happens in less than ten generations. As for the end of the Younger Dryas event, that resulted in a rapid warming that may have been noticeable in a single generation, for some long-lived individuals. (like what we are seeing now) It didn't result in a sudden sea level rise.

Again, no sudden sea level rise.

I should let my imagination run wild because you do?

Again, that Black Sea -catastrophe- never happened. It was a fund raising trick too, to get money out of credulous American creationists, of the 'the Flood really happened' kind,

Jan

It is a grab bag. You can find lots of wrong and right ends in there, depending on your prejudices about right and wrong,

Jan

Science has the advantage that it looks for concensus, and can end up with a pretty robust idea of right and wrong.

Philosophy is less coherent - with much more room for prejudice.

But I couldn't measure that all that accurately, and I need at least a rough value for the propagation delay before I could build the hardware on which I could have measured the propagation delay.

You may have a preference for expressing it in nanoseconds, but machinists prefer millimeters. I found it politic to keep them happy.

At least one engineer I knew complained that he was nothing but a walking table of conversion factors. Life would be easier if that was the whole job.

Please enlighten me as to your perception of my heretofore unstated argument.

USA situational poet laureate Edgar Allan Poe (EAP) disdained the "creeping and crawling" of Aristotelian and Platonic peerage group think. Instead, EAP highly valued individual independent intuitive leaps of imagination, as demonstrated by Kepler, Heaviside, and George Green:

George Green (mathematician)

... Green's life story is remarkable in that he was almost entirely self-taught. He received only about one year of formal schooling as a child, between the ages of 8 and 9. ...

In 1828, Green published An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism, which is the essay he is most famous for today. It was published privately at the author's expense, because he thought it would be presumptuous for a person like himself, with no formal education in mathematics, to submit the paper to an established journal. When Green published his Essay, it was sold on a subscription basis to 51 people, most of whom were friends who probably could not understand it. ...

On a visit to Nottingham in 1930, Albert Einstein commented that Green had been 20 years ahead of his time. The theoretical physicist Julian Schwinger, who used Green's functions in his ground-breaking works, published a tribute entitled "The Greening of Quantum Field Theory: George and I" in 1993. ...

For your preferred and self-serving definition of sudden.

What stopped the Gulf Stream seems to have been a lot of fresh water draining into the North Atlantic, and that would have shown up as sea level rise. Losing an appreciable proportion of the Greenland ice sheet would have much the same effect. It would take a while to melt in place, but there's evidence on the ocean floor that stuff has slid off and melted (dropping boulders) as it drifted south.

If you have an imagination at all, it might pay you to use it.

There was certainly an element of that in some of the reports. Something certainly did happen, and it would have made life difficult for those living in the area while it was going on.

The people who wanted torrents of sea water pouring in from the Mediterranean through the Bosphorus don't seem to found any evidence for that, but the water level went up quite fast over a fairly short time.

Mach, like Lagrange, or Aristotle for that matter, tells two sides of a story, one for simpletons and the other for cognizants.

About Lagrange then mostly, on the one hand the potentialism as the inner product, on the other as the outer product, then talking about particles as after a point-wise point-like model of objects, is at least as old as substances and essences, or the good old microscale and macroscale.

So, the near field and far field, for more examples, or the metric and norm, or particles and waves, each make to reflect upon, well, reflection, about matters of perspective and projection in geometry as motion.

Then, to make a wider, fuller account of the Mach-ian, as what was made reduction, into "anti-reductionism" or "re-expansionism", is better than the usual compounded half-accounts and the "merely partial".

In, "electrical engineering", that's simple as as "the ideal and practical" or generally it's of accounts of the "theoretical and practical", which one though's the half-account varies.

Not everybody has time to learn matters of abstraction and deduction and mathematical proof, it's usually easier to just imitate and follow along.

Boltzmann constant is in the little leaflet in every book on thermodynamics.

Often it's the only "physical constant" given.

The SI units are much separated from the relevant empirical domains these days.

For example, "defining" the second as about the cesium atom its hyperfine transition, and "defining" the meter as that according to the "defined" speed of light, results all that's defined not derived, the System Internationale units that we all know and love simply don't say much about the objective reality of the quantities.

So, go ahead and "define" energy. That's funny, because it's "derived" from various relations of various energies and configuration of experiment, the "regimes of the running constants".

Otherwise you're about half-right, in deep space in a vacuum at a frozen instant in time.