relativity and railroads

MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu
Wed Jul 2 15:48:56 CDT 1997


I dunno, Andrew, but somehow I suspect old Bertie might have anticipated that
 *obvious* reply and realized it didn't bear too much on the question.
  *Everything else*?  what could that possibly refer to?  Is everytrhing
 relative to everything else at the same time? Sequentially?  Randomly? 
Doesn't that reply require at the least an unbounded universe, something
 Einstein (and Russell too) emphatically rejected in favor of a *bounded but 
infinite nonetheless* model?  Isn't Russell just saying that there's an unmoved mover 
somewhere out there?

Or is it instead a case of *Pierre Dinn, the True Author of the PRINCIPIA*? ;-}

respectfully,
john m
*******************************

Mascaro sez:
>> One thing I recall was the great, Russellian acidity in the
>> observation he makes that many people blithely say *everything's
>> relative* but of course this is nonsense, sez Bertie, for if it were
>> so, what would it be relative TO?

Dinn replies:
>Not wanting to appear a polymath or anything, but clearly the answer
>is `to everything else'. I fail to see how Bertie's comment betrays
>either wit or insight. Perhaps he should have read more Leibniz?





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