usenet weirdness

Am Donnerstag000026, 26.02.2026 um 18:54 schrieb Bill Sloman: ...

'Climate' was once defined as the mean local state of the atmosphere.

But once the scum took over, that was changed and the word was used to describe the word as a hole.

This was necessary, because the scandal is meant as justification of what I would call 'tax on air', which is apparently planned for the first world countries, where 'climate' is more or less OK, even it could be a little warmer in many areas.

The real problem occurs, of course, in much poorer regions, where pollution and population growth is out of control.

But even if the countries in that region are actually responsible for what they do, they are far too poor to allow to extract a lot of tax.

So, the industrialized world is blamed for what they are not responsible and what they could not change efficiently.

The means to justify this bunk is actually a redefinition of the world 'climate', which is now used to describe the mean temperature of the entire Earth.

This was needed, because otherwise countries in the first world could rightfully claim, that they were not responisble and had nothing against warmer 'climate'.

...

TH

A clock is something that documents the passage of time in the space where the clock is located. Nobody is going to confuse the ruler used to measure distance with the distance measured.

Why would anybody think that?

Euclid worked on two dimensional geometry. Space-time is a complex four dimensional non-linear geometry.

Clocks don't exist to synchronise anything. They can be part of a local system which synchronises some local action to an event which has been observed from that location. Granting the bulk of the universe is expanding away from any given point at a speed which is increase with time and distance time dilation alone makes the idea of perfect synchronicity untenable.

Such an "external clock" is just a c*ck-eyed misapprehension of the concept being discussed. <snipped further fatuity>

That happened when weather forecasting became practical. People got to realise that high pressure areas and low pressure areas travelled across the country in roughly predictable directions at roughly predictable speeds. Electric telegraph system got fast enough after the 1850's for observers to keep track of them. If you think that those people were scum, you can comfort yourself with the thought that they are all dead.

Australia's "Telegraph" Todd was one of them, and he was highly respected at the time (and his grandson, Lawrence Bragg was Australia's first Nobel Prize winner).

The industrial revolution did involve burning a lot of fossil carbon which has had visible and now well-documented effect on the climate over the last century. Now that we have got the point where the cheapest way of generating electric power is with solar cells, and wind turbines are the second cheapest, we can stop burning fossil carbon and messing up the climate even more and still manufacture stuff in huge volumes, and more cheaply and efficiently than we used to. We haven't actually got to the point where we are burning less fossil carbon than we did last year, but we are close to it, and China is making a lot of money out of making remarkably cheap solar cells in enormous volumes (which is why they can make them cheaply).

Climate got redefined when we could collect enough data around the world to realise that the weather around the world was connected. Satellites in orbit looking down at the atmosphere did a much better job than weather observatories on the ground has done, but ground based observers had been doing a pretty good job for about a century before we had satellites to do it better.

The low lying islands in the Pacific aren't too worried about a warmer climate in their area, but they are deeply worried about the effects of a warmer climate on the ice sheets on top of Greenland and West Antarctica.

These are are going to slide off and melt over the next few centuries, and produce about 10 meters of sea level rise, which will submerge a lot of low lying islands. The Dutch sea defenses are going to need work too.

It's a "clock hypothesis", that a "clock hypothesis" is that the universe has one, a "clock hypothesis" is usual in many accounts of physics the theory, for example Einstein has one.

Most people think he doesn't because they're confused by aspects of relativity theory, and about Minkowski then the space-time, yet he says so, Einstein, for example in "Out of My Later Years".

Anything else eventually violates causality, or the usual idea that there's a physics at all, a "cosmological principle".

This sort of "clock hypothesis" for something like Einstein's account of "requirements and desiderata of a total field theory" is more than what's slapped on to SR and called "clock hypothesis".

It does though get itself directly slapped onto SR.

My understanding of time begins with MAN AND TIME by Priestley. Although it's intellectually imprudent to excerpt a single sentence to summarize his survey:

"One metaphysical idea of Time: We do not discover Time but bring it with us; it is one of our contributions to the scene; our minds work that way."

Shadbolt shares similar sentiments:

Could Einstein's definition of time have been one of the greatest hindrances to the advancement of human knowledge that history has ever known?

About Time: Einstein Was Wrong

Discussions about how to define 'time' inevitably become philosophical debates. As I've noted previously, 'everybody knows what time is until they try to define it'. For the framework of this article, let's limit our discussion about time to looking at Einstein's definition of time in special relativity and contrasting that with the understanding of time in quantum mechanics.

In special relativity, Einstein defined time simply as a measure of how long an event takes, as measured by a clock. This is a sensible, straightforward measure. For example, the time it took me to read the previous paragraph, measured by a stopwatch, was 10 seconds. In special relativity, clocks are used as an objective standard for measuring the time intervals of physical processes.

The problem is that this sensible measure of time becomes time itself.

For example, if an atomic clock is observed to slow down (it registers fewer oscillations of the caesium atom at a different altitude), this is not understood as a change in the clock's operating speed. In relativity, this slowing is interpreted as a slowing in the rate of time itself.

... this mistaken interpretation commits an error that Sir Isaac Newton warned us against in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

Newton wrote, 'Relative quantities are not the quantities themselves whose names they bear, but sensible measures of them.. and by the names time, space, place, and motion their sensible measures are to be understood; and the expression will be unusual if the measured quantities themselves are meant. ..those violate the accuracy of language, who interpret these words for the measured quantities.'

Putting this concept into the modern context, even when the motion of light in a vacuum is used as the standard 'clock' to measure time, it is still just a physical entity that can be influenced by other physical processes, known or unknown. This was Einstein's biggest mistake; he employed a physical process (the motion of light) to serve as a stand-in for time itself. In Newton's words, he expressed a sensible measure of time as time itself.

French philosopher Henri Bergson, a contemporary of Einstein, disputed relativity's portrayal of time by arguing that there is a difference between time itself and what clocks display. Clocks display arbitrary fractions of periodic events such as the motion of the Sun across the sky (as shown on a sundial), grains of sand moving through an hourglass, the number of swings of a pendulum, or the number of oscillations of a caesium atom (the current standard), but this is not the physical reality of time itself. The physical reality of time is the standard against which we can compare these events.

You cannot understand Physics as natural philosophy anymore. We have grown out of such thinking about 300 years ago (Newton).

They are obviously clueless:

No. This statement betrays a fundamental misconception about special relativity already.

An event does not "take time": It is a *point* of a spacetime. A point has dimension *zero*, it has *no extent*.

Even more fun.

"Flame war" and "science" might turn out to be different things.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Prove Priestley wrong. Use your best rhetoric to define Time in your own words.

Learn how to quote; indeed, learn how *to post*. (One quotes only the relevant minimum of the precursor, the parts that one directly refers to. One posts only to relevant newsgroups. When crossposting, one ought to set Followup-To to the one, most relevant newsgroup.)

As to Priestley:

,-

He was NOT a physicist, not even a scientist. His understanding of time is

F'up2 sci.physics.relativity

Your rhetorical arguments are above average, almost awesome!

Drop your ad hominem attacks and prove Priestley wrong. Use your best rhetoric to define Time in your own words.

That's getting philosophical, some physicsts have that their philosophy is that they're deaf-mute about philosophy, and we are too.

Philosophers of physics philosophy of physics isn't that, though.

A usual idea distinguishing philosophy and science is that science starts with a theory and philosophy ends with one.

F'up2 poster

Get well soon.

For once a statement by you which is NOT word salad, and with which I fully agree.

In fact, the idea that a theory about Nature does not stand on its own, merely because an "eminent" philosopher has formulated it or it sounds convincing or is internally logically consistent; but that it needs to be

But you don't know enough about science to be in a position to make any kind of distinction. Science is about observable phenomena, and flame wars are personal abuse, but your idea of science accommodates climate change denial propaganda which depends on misrepresenting observed phenomena, to belittle people who present them correctly.

But special relativity got superseded by general relativity in 1915.

It threw in gravitational effects, which turn out to significant, and mess up real clocks in what turns out to be perfectly predictable (and location dependent) ways.

Einstein wrote something like 'time is what clocks say'.

And I had rejected this idea, because it would in effect exchange the natural phenomenon with the reading of a measuring device.

I regard physical quantities as attributes of some system or object, while emasuring devices as man-made objects, which belong to the realm of the observer.

TH