Re:Why nothing can go faster than the speed of light
by stephth on Monday February 21, 2011 @02:31AM
(#2244644)
If she had started by explaining relativity her post would have been twice the size and she would have lost half the audience. Doesn't it matter to you that people were actually interested in the topic and participative?
And why is a follow up no good? She didn't follow up to fix anything. She followed up to follow up. (And mentioned it by, yes, editing her article).
Re:Why nothing can go faster than the speed of light
by burgerbrain on Monday February 21, 2011 @02:45AM
(#2244680)
The problem here is that when explaining things improperly to be "good enough" you have to be very very careful to make it clear what you're doing.
In my opinion, she failed to properly do that and crossed the line between "helpfully simplifying" and "incorrect".
Re:Why nothing can go faster than the speed of light
by stephth on Monday February 21, 2011 @03:08AM
(#2244715)
I went through your comments and you mentioned that "in a nutshell" the fact that there's no such thing as a full stop in space is why "this explanation is actually doing a disservice". But that's confusing to me because she clearly stated - relatively to motion - "Those things are true, but we're ignoring that kind of stuff right now."
Can you point out exactly where she crossed the line in your opinion?
Re:Why nothing can go faster than the speed of light
by burgerbrain on Monday February 21, 2011 @03:20AM
(#2244734)
The confusion being expressed among commenters here is what I'm basing my assertion off of. Simplification is fine, but I think in this case it pretty clearly set a lot of people down the wrong track.
And addressing something in a followup is no good - fix your initial post to be correct in the first place. Reddit allows you to edit your post.