User talk:TimothyRias/temp4

Comments by A. di M.

1. In some sentences, the tense of dependent clauses is backshifted when the main clause is in the past tense ("it was not known whether light travelled instantaneously"), in others it isn't ("Euclid and Ptolemy advanced the emission theory of vision, where light is emitted from the eye, thus enabling sight"). (It's also in the current article, but I wonder why I didn't notice it before.) It might be made consistent.

   About the tenses and clauses. Yeah, it was like that in the text I copied from the current article. Not sure what to change though. Changing the clause in the first example to present tense seems very odd to me. However changing the second example also lead to weird implications. TimothyRias (talk) 12:56, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

2. Why have you removed Subhash Kak's quotation?

   To answer the second question. I removed the quotation, because Subhash Kak's opinion on the matter is just not notable. TimothyRias (talk) 12:56, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

3. "Using this and his principle of relativity as a basis he derived the special theory of relativity, in which the speed of light c featured as a fundamental parameter, a priori unrelated to light." That might be the modern understanding of SR, but Einstein in 1905 explicitly used light in one of the two postulates; later on he said something like "Maxwell's equations are laws of physics after all, so assuming all laws of physics are the same for all inertial observers would entail that the speed of light is invariant anyway." Turning that last observation into something clear enough would not be worth the bother IMO, so you could either terminate the sentence at "parameter", or have "fundamental parameter, also appearing in contexts having little or nothing to do with electromagnetism" or something to that effect.

I can see no other issue with this text. ― A._di_M. (formerly Army1987) 23:22, 9 February 2010 (UTC)