Friday, September 22, 2006
Friday Pie Blogging: Relativity Edition
by Tom Bozzo
In honor of the late (?) best blog, the Fafblog!
Isaac, though better equipped than Daniel or any other man alive to understand Relativity, shewed no interest in his pie — as if being in a state of movement with respect to the planet Earth rendered it somehow Not a Pie. But as far as Daniel was concerned, a pie in a moving frame of reference was no less a pie than one that was sitting still: position and velocity, to him, might be perfectly interesting physical properties, but they had no bearing on, no relationship to those properties that were essential to pie-ness... If Pie were far asunder from Daniel or moving at a large relative velocity — e.g., being hurled at his face — then its pie-ness was somehow impaired, at least from the Daniel frame of reference. For the time being, however, these were purely Scholastic hypotheticals. Pie was on his lap and very much a pie, no matter what Isaac might think of it.Note to self: get apples at market, make pie this weekend.— Neal Stephenson, The System of the World
