My comment was meant to be a data point that IMO Decius’ misinterpretation of you is not as unjustifiable as you think it is, and I would rather see less indignance if possible, as it makes reading the recent comments section much less fun. I thought this data point would be useful as it is coming from someone not actually involved in the conversation at hand and hence with presumably less motive for social maneuvering. If it gets voted below −2 then I would assume that I’m in a minority that’s not good at understanding your posts.
For the record, the exact sequence of statements that prompted me to say that the issue was lack of clarity as opposed to something else:
What happens when the bubble overtakes light?
The same thing that happens when I overtake a car. I go around.
How, exactly, do you “go around” a wavefront which is propagating out from you in all directions?
I don’t and didn’t say that.
The reasonable interpretation of your “I go around” statement isn’t the one that occurred to me first. Should Decius have spent more than 20 seconds puzzling out a model for you that doesn’t mean something bizarre by that statement? Possibly. Sometimes it’s faster just to ask what the other party meant (Decius could have done a better job of this). Should you have spent more than 20 seconds considering whether that statement had obvious misinterpretations? Possibly. It’s difficult to predict how people will misunderstand one’s own statements.
I thought it was clear that he was saying that he was overtaking something which was traveling in the same direction and going faster than him. I probably read a little bit too much into it, thinking that he was intending to win by driving the bubble in a ‘path’ that went ‘around’ the ‘straight line’ between the start and finish, not distorting any of the space through which the ‘direct’ radiation was traveling. (quotes because the terms aren’t strictly meaningful).
In other words, he was ‘going around’ the light he was beating. I was pointing out that he didn’t just have to go around a ray of a photon, he had to go around a wave expanding in all directions, and that the ‘region’ of ‘compressed space’ would also help that wave arrive at the destination ‘sooner’, regardless of the method used to ‘go around’ it.
My comment was meant to be a data point that IMO Decius’ misinterpretation of you is not as unjustifiable as you think it is, and I would rather see less indignance if possible, as it makes reading the recent comments section much less fun. I thought this data point would be useful as it is coming from someone not actually involved in the conversation at hand and hence with presumably less motive for social maneuvering. If it gets voted below −2 then I would assume that I’m in a minority that’s not good at understanding your posts.
For the record, the exact sequence of statements that prompted me to say that the issue was lack of clarity as opposed to something else:
The reasonable interpretation of your “I go around” statement isn’t the one that occurred to me first. Should Decius have spent more than 20 seconds puzzling out a model for you that doesn’t mean something bizarre by that statement? Possibly. Sometimes it’s faster just to ask what the other party meant (Decius could have done a better job of this). Should you have spent more than 20 seconds considering whether that statement had obvious misinterpretations? Possibly. It’s difficult to predict how people will misunderstand one’s own statements.
I thought it was clear that he was saying that he was overtaking something which was traveling in the same direction and going faster than him. I probably read a little bit too much into it, thinking that he was intending to win by driving the bubble in a ‘path’ that went ‘around’ the ‘straight line’ between the start and finish, not distorting any of the space through which the ‘direct’ radiation was traveling. (quotes because the terms aren’t strictly meaningful).
In other words, he was ‘going around’ the light he was beating. I was pointing out that he didn’t just have to go around a ray of a photon, he had to go around a wave expanding in all directions, and that the ‘region’ of ‘compressed space’ would also help that wave arrive at the destination ‘sooner’, regardless of the method used to ‘go around’ it.