WillieStyle wrote...
Nonsequiter.dan107 wrote...
Why do you think a century is a long time in the grand scheme of things.
In an earlier post, you said 300 years ago people had no thoeretical reasons to disbelieve near instantaneous earth-spanning communications. This is false. If electromagnetic waves required an "ether" to propagate, then much of our current telecommunications architecture would be impossible.
Point me to a substantial body of work dated 300 years ago that explains in great detail, and is backed by experimentation, why lightspeed communication using electromagnetic waves is problematic to the point of being paradoxical.
Wether or not anyone ever wrote "A Treatise on the Impossibility of Fiber Optic Communications," ether-based light propatation would make modern telecommunications impossible. That no one 300 years ago bothered to point this out has nothing to do with anything.
How is that a non sequitur? My point is that the reason that people thought that modern communication was impossible was based on their ignorance of the concepts involved. Our reasons for considering FTL travel highly unlikely are based not on our ignorance of the laws of physics, but on our understanding of them. The theory of ether did not have the impossibility of communication via electromagnetic radiation detailed explicitly as its central premise, nor did it have the kind of experimental confirmation that GR has.
There is a big difference between thinking that something's impossible because you have no idea how to do it and thinking that something's impossible because you can come up with a mountain of theories and experiments that lead you inescapably to that conclusion.
Modifié par dan107, 15 février 2010 - 06:17 .
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