Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 15:48:53 -0500
Subject: Re: Rahul and Dromology


Leo, when I mentioned you as someone who might even be thought to possibly
pay some attention to this dromology business, I was doing it tongue in
cheek. Live and learn, I guess.

 But to conclude
>from that that all talk of time and space is nonsense is really to proceed on
>the basis of ignorance and a lack of information.

Who was concluding any such thing? I know a fair amount of non-nonsensical
talk of time and space.

>>From the very little I know about physics, it involves some theorization of
>time and space, and there would probably be some fruitful and productive
>results from studies which brought that body of thinking into an exchange
>with the best of the social and historical thought on time and space. That is
>a task for someone who knows a great deal more about physics than I do, and
>than the dromology list seems to hold, and someone who knows a great deal
>more about the social and historical analyses of time and space than the
>physicists I have met. It remains to be seen when such a person will appear.

This is false. The "best of the social and historical thought on time and
space" is not, and could not possibly be, worth a hill of beans. The last
time there was even the slightest thing that any other discipline could
teach physics about time and space was the early 19th century, when
geologists discovered a few decades ahead of physicists that the earth, and
therefore the universe, was at least tens of millions of years old. Time
and space are as fundamentally part of the domain of physics as are the
interactions of elementary particles. Without learning the relevant
physics, no one will have any more that's worth saying about time and space
than they will about the charge of the electron.

I doubt that the physical understanding of time and space will have any
useful application to the realms of social and historical thought either,
though at least that's not impossible in principle.

Rahul




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