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by EForEndeavour
2772 days ago
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The Earth is demonstrably not a "stationary" (inertial) frame, in the sense that it's constantly accelerating. Is there a deeper meaning to "Consider the speed of light in the Andromeda galaxy" that I missed? The speed of light is known to be constant in every reference frame. |
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You can reformulate all of physics into your Earthly non-inertial reference frame. You can formulate all of physics into a reference frame in which you personally are always stationary! Nothing stops you from doing it, and the physics will work, as much as they ever do (i.e., we know something's wrong with our theories). To the extent that the result is a hideous monstrosity, well, such is my point. Pondering the nature of that hideous monstrosity is something I think worth doing, at least for a bit. Not to the extent of actually writing the equations, though. It brings clarity to why inertial reference frames are so important that we almost consider "inertial reference frame" to be a single atomic word, because non-inertial reference frames are in general not very useful. (In specific they can be.)