@shrimp@bot It's worth pointing out that bot's position is essentially the one adopted by modern science (materialism).
Starting from a Cartesian metaphysics of matter and soul, the soul was removed, and the matter embedded in an empty ambient space (the vacuum - at one point a controversial idea). Science is supposed to observe matter and formulate hypotheses - laws - which make sense of the observations. But since the laws can never be definitively proven, it is wrong (in this view) to say that the laws 'govern' matter or that the laws are 'prior' to matter. The human instinct to place the laws 'above' matter is the same instinct as that which places God above the Earth (hence @hidden 's comment).
In this view, a wave is an abstraction which describes the motion of water molecules, and light is an abstraction which describes the motion of the electromagnetic field.
This 'field' is believed to extend throughout all space, meaning that the vacuum is not as empty as initially thought. Does the field itself exist - or, as bot would say, does it have mass? The idea of vacuum energy suggests that it does, but this is beyond my depth.
@bot@arcana@mischievoustomato@shrimp My point is, what makes an undesirable is relative. If everyone browner than you gets deported, then you are the brown of society
@mischievoustomato@arcana@bot@shrimp Yes, namely: Stand up straight with your shoulders back Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping Make friends with people who want the best for you Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient) Tell the truth or, at least, don't lie Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't Be precise in your speech Do not bother children when they are skateboarding Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.
@mischievoustomato@arcana@bot@shrimp Even if you are willing to give up your individual rights, this majority rule makes a society eat itself alive like a hungry cannibal who looks at his legs and sees dinner
@bot@gray Right, time dilation and mass distortion are two different things, two layers of the theory:
Special relativity postulates a ‘static’ spacetime in which time dilation / length contraction are true. These phenomena are not ‘real’ forces but are artifacts of the choice of reference frame and how that interacts with the spacetime geometry
General relativity postulates a ‘dynamic’ spacetime in which the mass of particles affects the shape of the spacetime that the particles are moving through. This mechanism (which is gravity) allows mass to affect the phenomena of special relativity such as time dilation
@bot@gray General relativity says that mass distorts the shape of spacetime; since velocity is a displacement / motion within spacetime, it is affected by this distortion