Motor Daddy:
I agree in this case that the boat had an absolute velocity in space of 11.27km/hr, but you have no way of knowing the velocity of the pool in space. I know that, you don't. I have a preferred frame, you don't, remember?
In the question with the ship and the pool and the little boat, we don't care about the boat's velocity in space. We only want the boat's velocity relative to the land or water that the ship is moving in.
In fact, there's no problem in which the velocity of "space" ever needs to be known.
I know the velocity of the river in space, but you don't. All you know is that the river flows compared to the embankment, but you DON'T KNOW, or have any means available to you to determine the embankment's velocity in space.
To answer the problem in the opening post of this thread, I don't need to know the river's velocity in space. I only need to know its velocity relative to the embankment. And the embankment's velocity in space is irrelevant to that.
You never acknowledge the embankment can travel in space because you ASSUME the embankment is always at rest.
No. The embankment can do whatever it damn well likes in space. All I care about is the speed the river is flowing relative to the embankment. That's all the problem asks for.
Again, what is the velocity of the embankment and how do you determine that velocity? In my world the embankment can move, but in your world it can't.
Sure it can, and it does. The earth is moving through space, isn't it? But that doesn't affect anything in the problem.
In my world I know the embankment velocity and in your world the embankment never has a velocity.
See above.
Motor Daddy said:
James R said:
Once we've covered all that, please explain to me why my solution to the problem at the start of this thread is wrong.
Because the speed of the boat in CURRENT is not linear to the speed that the boat traveled in still water.
I have no idea what you mean by "linear" in that sentence.
So what's your solution to the problem of the current?
Is the problem unsolvable, in your opinion? Is there no way to know how fast a river is flowing from the kind of information given in the problem statement, according to you?
I must say, Motor Daddy, your physics doesn't seem to be very useful for anything. You can't solve problems with it. You can't find this invisible, undetectable "space" you insist on having. You don't know the speed of anything relative to that "space". Your theoretical answers for light don't match real-world experimental results. You can't predict anything. So, what has your theory got going for it?
James, I have a question for you:
If you are swimming in a pool on a cruise ship that is traveling in a harbor at a substantial speed, and the harbor is at rest in space, is it harder for you to swim in one direction vs the other? Do you feel more force on your arms swimming in one direction vs the other when you are rotating your arms at the same rate each direction of travel? Can you feel the difference when swimming in each direction?
I have no idea what would happen in your imaginary world of Motor Daddy physics, with your imaginary "space". I can only say what happens in real-world pools on real-world ships - ones that travel in real-world harbors that are not stationary relative to any "preferred frame". In those real-world situations, you don't feel any more or less force on your arms regardless of the direction you swim, as long as the ship keeps moving at constant velocity. This is because the laws of physics are the same in all inertial reference frames. In other words, Einstein's relativity once again correctly predicts real-world observations.
Going back to the boat-in-the-flowing-river example, by the way, the motor wouldn't encounter any more resistance going upstream compared to going downstream. At full throttle, it would produce the same 8 km/hr speed relative to the water, upstream and downstream, regardless of the flow rate of the river relative to the embankment.