OT: Speed of light [was Re: Why not a Python compiler?]

[Erik Max Francis]

Steve Holden wrote:

> Well the history of physics for at least two hundred years has been a 
> migration away from the intuitive. In strict linguistic terms the word 
> "subatomic" is a fine oxymoron. I suspect it's really "turtles all the 
> way down".

Well, hard to say that's been a monotonic pattern.  For instance, 
Aristotelian physics had an awful lot of components that were fairly 
bizarre, counter-intuitive, or even contrary to easily gained 
experience.  The notion of impetus -- where an object throw moves in a 
straight line until it runs out of impetus, then falls straight down -- 
is clearly contrary to everyday experience of watching two people throw 
a ball back and forth from a distance, since the path of the ball is 
clearly curved.

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