Re: OT: Speed of light [was Re: Why not a Python compiler?]

Steve Holden wrote:

Well the history of physics for at least two hundred years has been a migration away from the intuitive. In strict linguistic terms the word "subatomic" is a fine oxymoron. I suspect it's really "turtles all the way down".

Well, hard to say that's been a monotonic pattern. For instance, Aristotelian physics had an awful lot of components that were fairly bizarre, counter-intuitive, or even contrary to easily gained experience. The notion of impetus -- where an object throw moves in a straight line until it runs out of impetus, then falls straight down -- is clearly contrary to everyday experience of watching two people throw a ball back and forth from a distance, since the path of the ball is clearly curved.

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