[richardjordan]

Per the footnotes at the bottom this builds on the work of Hardy a few years ago, who demonstrated that QM could easily have been derived by Victorian era mathematicians as a generalization of probability theory available at the time.

While not everything in the book is perfect, it also reminds me of Penrose's Road to Reality, which painstakingly takes the question "what is a number?" to build up a sophisticated understanding of what that means and then explains how this impacts Physics in a very real way.

We've made so many advances in recent decades we sometimes forget to step back and reformulate our teaching methodologies to incorporate what we know, simplify the teaching, and make the ideas more accessible earlier, so we can put more minds to work on extending them. That's a shame.

[richardjordan]

...also regarding his final point about the speed of light - of course special relativity which explains this is similarly a generalization of older theories such as Galilean relativity.

If you look at the work of Feigenbaum - e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.1234 - you'll see how similar to Hardy deriving QM purely by continuing older lines of thought, the fact the universe has a maximum possible speed that anything can travel - the speed of light (though it's not strictly about light) can be derived from postulates as old as Galilean relativity. The speed of light cannot be infinite - it must have some value.

[lohankin]

Much simpler derivation of Lorentz transform: http://www.jackpenkethman.com/speedoflight/speedoflight.html

[theoh]

Is this the same argument that Minkowksi came up with in 1908, describing it as "staircase wit" (as it would have been impressive had it been thought of before Einstein's theory)?