[EM] Poor Richard's Education

[Forest Simmons]

On Tue, 14 May 2002, Joe Weinstein wrote in part:

> Non-junk math often takes a given object as standard for many objects,
> necessarily including itself.  For instance, given a coordinatized plane,
> the origin serves as a standard of location for all points, including
> itself.

This reminds me of attending lectures on general relativity by the great
physics professor John Archibald Wheeler about 25 years ago.  Professor
Wheeler had worked with Einstein longer and closer than anybody else who
was still alive at the time.

I asked him why cosmologists always used coordinate systems to describe
their space-time models when one of the main tenets of relativity is that
nothing should be dependent on any particular frame of reference.

He replied that whenever somebody asked Einstein that question, he always
answered, "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.  Blessed be the name
of the Lord."

Forest


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