Comments by "GH1618" (@GH-oi2jf) on "" video.

  1. I don't think Dr. Collier was objecting to Newton being a theist. She was objecting to his having based an argument pertaining to a physical question on theistic beliefs rather than on scientific method.
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  2. Poincaré had his own theory which accounted for the inability to detect the aether. He died before General Relativity, so just didn’t live long enough to change his thinking.
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  3. It's a polynomial curve. Your last statement is incorrect.
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  4. The electron does have mass. Did you mean photon? Search for “The Science Asylum photon”.
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  5. Feynman used the term “relativistic mass” in his lectures, so I would say that it is another way of looking at it which is now out of fashion.
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  6. Practical electricity is rather far removed from a modern physical understanding of the subject. If you had to teach the physics of electricity to people training to be electricians, there would not be many licensed electricians.
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  7. The Feynman Lectures have a section on relativistic mass.
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  8. Your problem is in thinking of a dimension as “spatial by definition.” It isn’t. Think of it mathematically. You have x, y, and z. There are your spatial coordinates. They give you a static description — a snapshot. But things are dynamic — they change over time. So you add t to your coordinates. That’s the 4th dimension which allows you to handle dynamics. Curvature of spacetime is a little harder to conceptualize, I admit. In effect, it means that light does not go straight in a gravitational field.
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  9. I just checked this in The Feynman Lectures. He said: “Newton wrote down three laws.” If Feynman was ok with it, I’m ok with it.
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  10. Google translate fails on this. I’m sure it should be “Lev Okun,” a Russian theoretical physicist. “Lev” is “Leo,” which we associate with lions.
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  11.  @ikkimurrell1074 — But Lev Okun was a Russian physicist. So what was meant by the original post?
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  12. All engineers take a year of college physics, so that keeps the numbers up. It wouldn’t be efficient to have separate college courses for engineers and physicists at the basic level.
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  13. I think “lie” is too strong a word here.
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  14.  @somacoma2219 — I think she assumes some mathematical sophistication in her audience, as she should.
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  15. No one understood chemistry until Lavoisier.
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  16. Simple models are often useful. Reality is too complicated to be taught from the beginning of the subject. Students should be taught that every description of physical phenomena is a model, and that models can be refined to more accurately describe reality.
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  17. The aether was imagined to be something which could be used to distinguish between inertial frames by comparing the speed of light in different directions. That didn’t work out.
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  18. The word is not the thing. This subject provides a good example.
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  19. From CERN: “Particle physicists use the word "mass" to refer to the quantity (sometimes called "rest mass") which is proportional to the inertia of the particle when it is at rest. This is the "m" both in Newton's second law of motion, F=ma, and in Einstein's equation, E=mc2 (in which E must be interpreted as the energy of the particle at rest). …”
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  20.  @camila314 Newton starts at 6:25.
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  21. The Greeks understood geometry from Euclid’s axioms, which seem reasonable when applied to nature in the human-scale world of our experience. Euclidean geometry is not sufficent to understand the universe. The singularity point is just a consequence of a particular mathematical model. I don’t think cosmologists claim to have a theory of the instant of the origin of the universe. The theory start some time after.
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  22. In the case of a photon, it is massless.
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  23. I think it comes from the Lorentz transformation. Special Relativity starts with the assumption that the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames of reference, which is known from experiment. The Lorentz transformation is the thing that makes it work, and it needs a term with the speed of light to make the math work. The transform maps spacetime coordinates across inertial frames. The famous equation comes out of the need to satisfy conservation of momentum.
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  24. The physics is not in the units, it’s in the relationships between things. If you are going to define a unit in such a way as to simplify one part of an equation, you also need different units everywhere else in order to express the proper relationship.
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  25.  @michaelsherwin4449  — The speed of light is defined in the units we conventionally use in science, S.I. It is now considered to be a fundamental constant of nature. The speed of light in a vacuum is exactly 299,792,458 meters per second, thus le mètre is now defined in terms of the speed of light. There is no point in defining a new unit to get a smaller, more convenient number, because we can just use the symbol “c.” It isn’t defined this way because we want it to be a large number, and it isn’t in the equation (and squared) because we want a large constant in the equation; it is there because it comes out of the physics. I can’t explain it; Dr. Collier will have to do that if she chooses to. Suffice it to say that a small amount of mass can be turned into a huge amount of energy regardless of the units you choose. You can’t change the fundamental physics by tinkering with units.
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