Dear Dr. Petkov, dear Dr. Crecraft,
I have followed your very interesting discussion, but, it's only my first essay contest here, so I did not understand all arguments. Could you give me some comments on the following:
- I totally agree that all experiments that Dr. Petkov shows clearly refute the 3d-space plus 1d-time world in favour of a 4d-spacetime, which remains a good world even when we add gravitation to it.
But how do these experiments guarantee that Minkowskis 4d-spacetime is the only possible explanation of the observed phenomena? (This goes in the direction of Popper's arguments that we can only refute hypotheses, like the 3d space, but how can we guarantee, for instance, that we are not moving w.r.t. some ether, we could just be moving so slowly that our detectors cannot measure it or we could think of some other effect compensating that motion. What I mean: there could be degeneracies)
- I agree to Dr. Crecraft, stating that observations are the important keys to probe our universe. I also believe that our theories and hypothesis describe ontologies and don't end in solipsism. Yet, are observations true facts, as you write in a comment above? How about the argument that every observation is, to some degree, again dependent on some potentially unproven assumptions? (This goes in the direction of quantum mechanics that knowledge becomes observer-dependent, here dependent on the observer's assumptions and interpretations of the measurement.)
I would highly appreciate your ideas on these questions.
Best wishes to both of you for the essay contest!
Sincerely,
Jenny Wagner