J G Miller wrote:
On Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:49:45 +0100, brightside S9 wrote:

Where do you get all this crap from? It sounds to me your physics teacher
(if you ever had one) was a chemist or a biologiost.

That is a unwarranted slur against chemists and biologists.

Its perfectly obvious whoever 'taught' him, and I use the word
advisedly, thought that Newtonian equations were exact, and relativity
ONLY applied to other stuff like nuclear reactions.

This does not surprise me at all. The standard of science education is
and has been falling for some time, and very few people even now really
understand Newtonian mechanics, let alone relativistic.

There are people out there with science and mathematics qualifications
who don't even understand what a vector is.

Viz a rough precis of a conversation on the net last month

'how much kinetic energy does a car travelling at 70mph have'
'kinetic energy with respect to what? Kineti9c energy is a function of
the vectors sums of *oow* velocities..'
'energy is a scalar, so it doesn't matter'


sigh.