RE: A question about Thomism
August 10, 2023 at 9:34 pm
(This post was last modified: August 10, 2023 at 9:34 pm by LinuxGal.)
(August 10, 2023 at 9:17 pm)Bucky Ball Wrote: I don't think Aquinas ever wrote anything specifically about simultaneity, but because he basically had an ancient worldview, his ideas about motion and time are all wrong.You can use an apparatus with a pair of lasers and timers to find a spot where the reflection of the laser beams from two mirrors arrive back at the apparatus at the same time. That makes the reflection events simultaneous.
If your friend is moving at 70% of the speed of light she can do the same thing, but from where you're standing the reflection events are not simultaneous at all, because the beams end up with outbound and inbound legs of different lengths, even though she swears the four legs of the two laser beam have entirely identical lengths.
Aquinas has nothing to teach us about any of this.
