I would suck my finger and stick it in the air to see if I could detect wind. If I couldn't, I'd assume I wasn't moving. HOW CAN THE ROAD BE THE FORCE THAT TURNS THE WHEELS WHEN UNLIKE THE BELT IT DOESN'T MOVE!!!???
RP, I'm trying not to react to this with anger, because I've addressed that in the post above, and now someone else is addressing it, and you don't actually seem to read and think about answers, because people have addressed this several times before me and you seem not to have read those answers either.
Let me see, I'm going to stick a wet finger in the air now to work out if I'm moving. Nope. I'm perfectly still. The Earth is the centre of the universe and the sun and moon must be orbiting. Sorry about the last thousand years of astronomy, but there you have it. The wet finger proves it.
RP, when you're outside on a perfectly still day, what does that mean. If you're where I think you are, the earth is spinning at roughly 500 miles per hour there. Are you motionless? No. Is the air motionless? No. Isn't that just like spork's very large treadmill belt, with trees and hills and lakes on it, and isn't it a "still day" by the fact that the air just happens to be travelling at the same speed round the surface of the planet where you are?
If the air was still w.r.t. the centre of the planet, you would be experiencing a windspeed of 500 mph. And that's before we factor in all the motions of the galaxy, etc. In the end, as has been said endlessly, MOTION IS RELATIVE - always, to something else. That "something else" can be thought of as a place, such that your velocity is the change of distance from that point, but - because velocities are all relative - we don't know the velocity of that point either. Its velocity is also relative to somewhere else. So in effect, velocities are relative to other velocities. When you say the air isn't moving outside, you're taking that bit of the earth where you are as "zero velocity" or "your frame of reference". But if you could literally capture that velocity somehow - measure the speed of a balloon with GPS equipment onboard, etc. - and then move a little way north or south, the earth there would be moving at a different velocity, so that same "still air" velocity would now not be zero, but a light breeze.
This is the problem humber is stuck with, and actually seeing you struggle with this does make me wonder if he's never really been pretending at all, but that maybe some people are just incapable of making this mental shift between frames of reference. Even so, he adds to the problem by never believing that other people can, despite their maths actually adding up and his coming out as nonsense. You're obviously a bit exasperated with this sometimes, but you're not arsey about it.
Hi sol, I've missed you! Uber-troll, yes, probably a better explanation - he might not see how wrong he is, but he can't not see a ruddy good chunk of how wrong he is.
Hmmm, it's already weird being back here and having to watch my "ruddy" language. It's like my granddaughter has come to play. JREF is a bit like Telly Tubbies Land. Thanks for the Dawkins intro, RP. Now ruddy get this frames of reference stuff or I'm going to track you down and kick your behind.
But even without that - look at your question above again - I answered it with a different point. The road drives the wheels anyway if you follow the logic - the cart as a whole is blown down the road and that forces the wheels to turn. If a shopping trolley was blown across a carpark, it would make the wheels turn, wouldn't it? You wouldn't be scratching your head wondering how that's happening without a "turbine"!
