On the Daily Mail forum, one participant (called “whats-in-a-name”) started talking about my book, The Unreal Universe, on July 15, 2006. It was attacked fairly viciously there. I happened to see it during a Web search and decided to step in and defend it.
A discussion in the Science Forums on the appearance of a laser dot on a ceiling. It is thought that if you pointed a laser dot on a ceiling and move the laser gun fast enough, the dot could move superluminally. Could it really?
This post is a long email discussion I had with my friend Ranga. The topic was the unreality of reality of things and how this notion can be applied in physics. Going through the debate again, I feel that Ranga considers himself better-versed in the matters of philosophy than I am. I too consider him better read than me. But I feel that his assumption (that I didn’t know so much that I should be talking about such things) may have biased his opinion and blinded him to some of the genuinely new things (in my opinion, of course) I had to say. Nonetheless, I think there are quite a few interesting points that came out during the debate that may be of general interest. I have edited and formatted the debate for readability.