Now if at the end of thinking you convinced yourself of yadda yadda straight line physics yadda yadda you were unfortunately mistaken. The tower argument is correct.
No, it isn’t, not really.
If the motion of the point on the Earth at the tower has two components, one which is a straight line and one which isn’t, and the straight line component is orders of magnitude larger than the other one (as it is over the course of a tower experiment), then it’s fair to say that “straight line physics” is the answer. It’s not literally 100% of the answer, of course, because of that small second component, but it’s almost 100% of the answer. It isn’t “mistaken” except to the same kind of pedant who insists that “humans have two legs” is mistaken because you really need to say that they average 1.99987 legs.
I disagree, because I think the intuition that leads people to accept the tower argument is not that if there’s a drift component, it’s negligible. In fact, I think people would accept the argument even for a planet sufficiently small to make the component non-negligible. The point is that the people formulated the tower argument had the right intuition but used it to defend the wrong view.
The intuition that leads them to accept the tower argument doesn’t include an explicit step “I am going to think about the drift componenet. Okay, I decided to ignore it”, but people don’t think out all steps that way. At some point they will implicitly assume that the drift component is negligible (and they will be correct).
No, it isn’t, not really.
If the motion of the point on the Earth at the tower has two components, one which is a straight line and one which isn’t, and the straight line component is orders of magnitude larger than the other one (as it is over the course of a tower experiment), then it’s fair to say that “straight line physics” is the answer. It’s not literally 100% of the answer, of course, because of that small second component, but it’s almost 100% of the answer. It isn’t “mistaken” except to the same kind of pedant who insists that “humans have two legs” is mistaken because you really need to say that they average 1.99987 legs.
I disagree, because I think the intuition that leads people to accept the tower argument is not that if there’s a drift component, it’s negligible. In fact, I think people would accept the argument even for a planet sufficiently small to make the component non-negligible. The point is that the people formulated the tower argument had the right intuition but used it to defend the wrong view.
The intuition that leads them to accept the tower argument doesn’t include an explicit step “I am going to think about the drift componenet. Okay, I decided to ignore it”, but people don’t think out all steps that way. At some point they will implicitly assume that the drift component is negligible (and they will be correct).