The Speed of Light: Constancy and Cosmos

Bibliography

174 · Notes to pages 94–101 5. Dyson, Disturbing the Universe, pp. 248–49. 6. Genz, Nothingness, p. 1. 8. Ambient Light 1. Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” p. 401. 2. This claim, previously noted, was first put forward by Plato in book 6 of The Republic. More recently P. W. Bridgman has written: “The most elementary examination of what light means in terms of direct experience shows that we never experience light itself, but our experience deals only with things lighted. This fundamental fact is never modified by the most complicated or refined physical experiments that have ever been devised” (The Logic of Modern Physics [New York: Macmillan, 1955], p. 151). Other similar statements from a broad range of thinkers could be offered, but I hope these will suffice to make the general point. 3. Addressing the apparent ability of photons and other subatomic particles to remain conjoined or connected across arbitrarily large spacetime intervals, H. P. Stapp writes: “Everything we know about Nature is in accord with the idea that the fundamental process of Nature lies outside space-time (surveys the space-time continuum globally), but generates events that can be located in spacetime [sic].” “Are Superluminal Connections Necessary?” Nuovo Cimento 40B (1977): 202. 4. Stephen Toulmin, The Philosophy of Science: An Introduction (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), p. 20. Compare Rom Harré, The Philosophies of Science: An Introductory Survey (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 63: “In trying to understand the way images are formed by curved mirrors and lenses, and how what one sees in a plane mirror is related to its position, in trying to understand the way shadows appear, and in a host of other phenomena, it is found very convenient to suppose that something passes from the object through the glass of the lens or mirror, is reflected by the mirrored surface, or bent in its path by the lens, and finally reaches the eye. Whatever it is travels in straight lines. These lines are light rays. They are the basis of geometrical optics. Once they were thought to be the paths of corpuscles. Later they were supposed to be geometrical abstractions from moving wave fronts, and nowadays they retain something of each of these classical conceptions. But they are not seen in nature, they are drawn on paper.” 5. Toulmin, The Philosophy of Science, p. 21. 6. Vasco Ronchi, Optics: The Science of Vision, trans. E. Rosen (Washington Square: New York University Press, 1957), p. 271. Emphasis in the original. 7. Geoffrey Cantor, The Discourse of Light from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 96–97. 8. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics, p. 153; see also Bridgman , The Nature of Physical Theory (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964), p. 126. Notes to pages 101–12 · 175 9. As Bridgman puts it: “There is no physical phenomenon whatever by which light may be detected apart from the phenomena of the source [emission apparatus] and the sink [absorption or detection apparatus].” The Logic of Modern Physics, p. 153. 10. In this regard, Bridgman states: “Physically it is the essence of light that it is not a thing that travels, and in choosing to treat it as a thing that does, I do not see how we can expect to avoid the most serious difficulties . . . . The properties of light remain incongruous and inconsistent when we try to think of them in terms of material things.” The Logic of Modern Physics, p. 164; emphasis in the original. 11. Wheeler, A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime, p. 43. 12. Edwin F. Taylor and John A. Wheeler, Spacetime Physics (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1966), pp. 31–32. 13. James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1966), p. 2. 14. Ibid., p. 17. 15. Ibid., p. 226. 16. Ibid., p. 198. 17. Ibid., p. 3. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., p. 198. 20. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), p. 3. 21. Quoted in Edward S. Reed, James J. Gibson and the Psychology of Perception (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 257. Emphasis in the original. 22. James J. Gibson, “A Note on the Relation Between Perceptual and Conceptual Knowledge.” Unpublished manuscript (July 1974) at http://lor .trincoll.edu/~psyc/perils/folder6/perceptcon.html (accessed 5 April 2004). Emphasis in the original. See also James J. Gibson, “Wave-Train Information and Wave...