Subject: (urth) Professor Jerry lines 'em up

From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2002 00:34:16 +0000

Jerry Friedman wrote:
>Thanks, Blattid.  I probably shouldn't mention that I have a
>Ph. D. in physics, since then people might stop arguing with me
>about physics, and as my students could tell you, I do make
>mistakes.

Well call me bushwacked.

<Curious to see what Professor Jerry will say about using t and t(o).>

=mantis=

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From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2002 23:26:00 +0000

> >about physics, and as my students could tell you, I do make

I apologize.  When I thought about it, I thought that my reasons for
not mentioning my Ph. D. were better than my reasons for revealing it,
so I probably should have stayed "in the closet".

> <Curious to see what Professor Jerry will say about using t and t(o).>

That works, but I still like my suggestion of "Urth time" and "Whorl
time".  To me, that's precisely what you're talking about--how long
it's been according to timekeeping on Urth and on the _Whorl_.

By the way, we covered S. R. in my Conceptual Physics class today,
and I used rough approximations to your numbers as an example, with a
plug for TBotLS.  Thanks!

[After they allowed me to escape with a Ph. D., my only association
with physics has been teaching it at community colleges, so I'm not
a professor--or a real physicist, as Dan'l called me.]

Jerry Friedman

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From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Date: Wed, 04 Dec 2002 17:08:46 +0000

Professor Jerry wrote:
>When I thought about it, I thought that my reasons for

I strongly disagree: not mentioning it upfront was what made it a
back-alley ambush of a housewife by an academician.  In the animal kingdom
this is predatory camouflage.

I think it is clear that I was addressing a person who seemed to be
exhibiting Newtonian thought.  Without the "Ph.D. in Physics" context, the
tagging of "Urth time" and "Whorl time" looked non-Einsteinian, and rather
Newtonian: the poster's unwritten, perhaps even unexamined assumption (like
blattid's non-Einsteinian initial and secondary estimates of the distance
between Urth and Breen systems) might well be something as simple and clean
as "Whorl years are 3 Urth years long," since after all, this will
establish how 333 years can equal 1000 years.  The point of my response was
to gesture at the wonder of time dilation as an Einsteinian reality (the
counterintuitive gulf between the universes of Newton and Einstein) and to
state the fact that I did not coin the terms.

>and I used rough approximations to your numbers as an example, with a

You are not welcome.  I will strive to avoid similar alleys and people in
the future.  And you should do your own calculations to avoid the taint of
pseudoscience and other academician nasties.

=mantis=

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From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, 04 Dec 2002 20:44:03 +0000

> this is predatory camouflage.

Clearly you're more upset about this than I gathered from your previous
post.  I'm sorry.  I had no intention of hurting anyone, certainly not
you, someone whose posts I'm often grateful for, and I feel bad that
that was the result of what I did.

However, I'm not entirely clear on why you feel so strongly about this.
Is it because if you'd known I'd studied physics, you wouldn't have
assumed I was responding to you from a Newtonian point of view?  I'd
appreciate clarification if you're interested in providing it.  In
any case, from my point of view there was nothing predatory about it.
I wasn't thinking, "Aha, I've trapped Mantis into making a statement
that I can correct!"--or enjoying the "ambush" in any other way.

Finally, I don't know whether this is important to you, but I won't do
this again in my other mailing-list and Usenet discussions.

> establish how 333 years can equal 1000 years.

I'm afraid I didn't even think, "What mistake does he believe I'm
making?"  I can see, though, that if you did want to use "Urth time"
and "Whorl time" in that table, you might need to explain those terms
so people wouldn't make that mistake.

> The point of my response was
> counterintuitive gulf between the universes of Newton and Einstein) and
> to state the fact that I did not coin the terms.

Indeed, I've seen "subjective" and "objective time" before in sf, and
if you were to tell me they've been used in popularizations as well,
I wouldn't be surprised.

> pseudoscience and other academician nasties.

If that's how you want it, I won't use your numbers any more.

Jerry Friedman

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