Neat find! I haven’t read all of it yet, but I found this
striking:
It was precisely the view, that successful abstractions
should not be regarded as representing something real,
that prevented Lorentz from discovering special
relativity. He believed that the time t of an observer at
rest with respect to the aether (which is a genuine
example of reifying an unsuccessful abstraction) was the
true time, whereas the quantity t of another observer,
moving with respect to the first, was merely an
abstraction that did not represent anything real in the
world. Lorentz himself admitted the failure of his
approach:
The chief cause of my failure was my clinging to the idea
that the variable t only can be considered as the true
time and that my local time t must be regarded as no more
than an auxiliary mathematical quantity. In Einstein’s
theory, on the contrary, t plays the same part as t; if
we want to describe phenomena in terms of x , y , z , t
we must work with these variables exactly as we could do
with x, y, z, t.
When you see a seemingly contingent equality—two things
that just happen to be equal, all the time, every time -
it may be time to reformulate your physics so that there
is one thing instead of two. The distinction you
imagine is epiphenomenal; it has no experimental
consequences. In the right physics, with the right
elements of reality, you would no longer be able to
imagine it.
Neat find! I haven’t read all of it yet, but I found this striking:
This reminds me of Mach’s Principle: Anti-Epiphenomenal Physics: