Right, that (a small portion of it) was what I quoted first, one exchange upthread, and satt still held to the intuition that there are rotational stresses in the absence of the universe’s background matter. So I went back/up/down[1] a level to the basic question of when you can rule out a certain “absolute” in nature: when the simplest laws stop requiring it.
The point I was trying to make (which I should have been more specific on) was that, just as the Galilean observation set sufficed to rule out “special” velocities and leave only relative ones, our observation set now has, as an optimal description, laws that give no privilege to any non-relative motion, including higher derivatives of velocity.
[1] whichever preposition would be least offensive
Right, that (a small portion of it) was what I quoted first, one exchange upthread, and satt still held to the intuition that there are rotational stresses in the absence of the universe’s background matter. So I went back/up/down[1] a level to the basic question of when you can rule out a certain “absolute” in nature: when the simplest laws stop requiring it.
The point I was trying to make (which I should have been more specific on) was that, just as the Galilean observation set sufficed to rule out “special” velocities and leave only relative ones, our observation set now has, as an optimal description, laws that give no privilege to any non-relative motion, including higher derivatives of velocity.
[1] whichever preposition would be least offensive
Ah, sorry. Upthread reading fail on my part.