{"id":376,"date":"2006-07-09T19:53:28","date_gmt":"2006-07-09T19:53:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/09\/why-do-they-always-ask-tough-q\/"},"modified":"2006-07-09T19:53:28","modified_gmt":"2006-07-09T19:53:28","slug":"why-do-they-always-ask-tough-q","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/09\/why-do-they-always-ask-tough-q\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Do They Always Ask Tough Questions?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was away at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.readercon.org\/\">Readercon<\/a> this weekend, which meant a fair amount of hanging out in a hotel bar socializing with writer types. One of whom was working on a novel that will have some hard-science elements to it, and had been looking for a physicist to ask questions of. Having just sat down, and being well supplied with beer, I offered to give it a shot.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, the first question she asked was (paraphrasing slightly, as I was well supplied with beer):<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Is the speed of light a property of space-time, or a property of light?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I still don&#8217;t quite know what to do with that one. Further elaboration suggested that the reason for the question had something to do with wanting to know why gravitational forces travel at the speed of light, which led me off into a whole bunch of stuff about the particle exchange picture of forces, and quantum field theories, and so on. It probably went downhill from there, as I don&#8217;t think my explanation of neutrino oscillations was very helpful&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve got any Deep Thoughts on these topics, this would be a good comment thread in which to post them. And, incidentally, help me test the recently tweaked spam countermeasures on the blog&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was away at Readercon this weekend, which meant a fair amount of hanging out in a hotel bar socializing with writer types. One of whom was working on a novel that will have some hard-science elements to it, and had been looking for a physicist to ask questions of. Having just sat down, and&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/09\/why-do-they-always-ask-tough-q\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Why Do They Always Ask Tough Questions?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}