you haven't clearly expressed what you mean by "and" at all. You've said it doesn't mean plus, this is the next option as far as I'm concerned.

What else is there?

no.

Do you mean e equals the kinetic energy, and also separately it equals the potential energy? That would imply kinetic energy is always equal to potential energy, which is just simply not true, so I didn't think you could possibly mean that. Plus seemed like a more reasonable interpretation, I was trying to be charitable with that.

how does that apply to a numerical value that you get for e from Einstein's equation? "This numerical value is equal to kinetic AND potential energy"?

originally I just wanted to know if it was meaningful to you, beyond just a bunch of symbols you've been told are "true" when you put them in that order. Through much deliberation, I think I've discovered the answer.

no it's not

I would say "what is 2 and 5?" Is a very common way of asking "what is 2 plus 5?"

and, plus, this seems pedantic to me. Either way you phrase it is equally incorrect. I don't know what "and" could possibly mean other than plus in this context anyway.

kinetic and potential energy, dude. In Newtonian terms. It's super simple. You already know this. — Arcane Sandwich

You didn't say that it does? Are you kidding?

Also you're wrong about what the e means, it doesn't mean kinetic plus potential.

formulas do not have true or false values on their own, for example. They are true or false only when applied to a specific realm of inquiry. E equals MC squared isn't some generally true formula, it is true when e means something specific, and m means something specific, and c means something specific. If you decide to make those variable mean something else, the equation is no longer true. The context of application makes a formula true or false, not the formula on its own.

that you're coming at this all wrong. You have drastically misunderstood a lot, and the things you think are obvious are not obvious. Some of the things you think are obvious, you're explicitly wrong about.

no, you wouldn't lol.

Its a formula, dude — Arcane Sandwich

Something that's just a formula has no truth value whatsoever. It doesn't make sense to call a formula "true".

A = dx + ey - z^3 true or false?

Fun fact: you're actually incorrect. The e in the equation is not about the sum of potential and kinetic energy. It refers to the objects "rest energy", which is a different figure altogether.

You've been saying how obvious it is, I don't think you're really taking seriously how extremely non obvious all this is. You think it's obvious but you have the wrong answers.

You don't know what it means.

And that's okay, but I think you could have a more interesting exploration of it all if you stopped calling it obvious and acknowledged that a bit.

I don't. It equals the kinetic AND potential? At the same time?

I don't think it is obvious. What does "the energy of an ordinary object" mean? I'm looking at my table, sitting there menacingly. I don't know what it means to talk about it's "energy". Do you? What does that mean?

For example I can say that if I put a fraction into the cosine function, it gives me "the angle". I'm on the way towards true understanding, but without knowing the angle OF WHAT, I'm just regurgitating words. Regurgitating words isn't meaning, even if there's a context in which those words are true.

My question isn't a question of curiosity, it's a question of meaning. It's not meaningful for you to say e equals MC squared if you don't know what it's the energy of. What are you calculating? The energy, fine, the energy of what? If you don't know, then you saying it's "true" is a lot like a kid saying his dad is Fargle

then I would giggle cause that's silly

I agree that is true, but I don't pretend to grasp the meaning. It's true to me in the same way that is true to that kid that his dad is Fargle.

you're the one who made the statement that it's true. You ought to know my dude

I guess as long as you allow for an implicit scaling factor. e equal S mc2. Without a scaling factor, it's the wrong answer.

One of the answers you actually could have given that would have been reasonable, but which you neglected, would have been to specify units. Without units, e equals MC squared isn't even true. E only equals MC squared within compatible units.

So when I asked what does it mean to say it's true, you could have actually said, "it means that I believe that if I take the speed of light in meters per second, square it, and multiply by mass in kilogrammes, that will be equal to the energy in joules.". That's more meaningful than what you said, because everything you said is unitless - but there's still one important thing missing from that - that calculation equals the energy OF WHAT?

Plugging numbers in isn't meaning. Replacing letters with the words they stand for isn't meaning. Even using the proper units is only a step towards meaning, but there's still a final unanswered question, it equals the energy of what?

I'm giving you a tough time because I think it's interesting! I think it's interesting that people can say something is true, without being able to say anything about what that something is.

Imagine a child who is around his dad a lot. He heard people say about his dad that his dad is very Fargle. He knows Fargle is a good thing, but he doesn't know what makes one person Fargle and another person not-fargle.

So he thinks his dad is Fargle, and he also doesn't know what Fargle means. I think that's interesting. If anybody asks him if his dad is Fargle, he'll give the "correct answer", but when it comes out of his mouth there's almost a sense in which it's not correct. He doesn't MEAN the correct thing by it when he says it's true. He's just saying sounds.

I think that's interesting.

Again, why don't you tell me? — Arcane Sandwich

I'm not the one claiming to understand it so I wouldn't know.

Any truth value I put in e equal mc2 is based on trust that people who do understand it are competent enough to test for it and experimentally show that it works.

I'm not claiming understanding. I'm explicitly saying, I have no idea what it means. I don't know why anyone would multiply a mass by a speed and then by a speed again.

Given your answers here, I don't think you do either.

Any 6 year old could plug numbers into a calculator. That's all your procedure is. That's not understanding.

It's okay if you don't understand. I don't either. I think we could have an interesting conversation if you just admitted it. You don't know why it's meaningful to multiply a mass by a speed twice.

That's what we call a little bit of humor.

Do you know what it means to multiply a mass by a speed, twice? What does it mean? Not numerically, conceptually. Why would you ever multiply a mass by a speed twice?

Most people intuit why you would multiply a Time by a Speed. That makes intuitive sense. Why a mass?

I tried to ask chat gpt, what does it mean to multiply mass by a speed and then by a speed again? Chat gpt gave a very illuminating answer:

A network error occurred. Please check your connection and try again. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com.

So you know what it means to multiply a mass by a speed, twice? Can you explain it to me?

I know what it means to multiply a Time by a Speed. If you have a car going x miles per hour, you can multiply that by the number of hours they were going that speed to find out how many miles they travelled. I get the meaning of that deeply.

I don't know what it means to multiply a mass by a speed, twice. Do you?

Right, and you could also believe that 勾股定理 has been corroborated many times. You could even believe that without understanding what 勾股定理 means. You could have read text books that communicate the verified truthiness of 勾股定理 and come to accept it as a scientific fact, even without knowing what it means, right?

Did you read the rest of that post?

yes, because the first premise wasn't one of my premises.

I'm also not making an argument so much as just spinning ideas.

Are you sure about this? — Arcane Sandwich

Not entirely, no, but it seems to me that someone who can't tell me what it means to multiply mass by a speed would have a hard time testing if multipying a mass times a speed, twice, were "true".

I think you understand all the symbols in isolation, and you understand the mathematical operations involved from a numerical perspective - you know generally what it means to multiply one number by another number, and what it means for one number to be equal to another number...

But I don't think that's a demonstration that you *actually* understand what e=mc2 means.You keep saying you already showed it's meaning - you didn't. You replaced the symbols with the words that the symbols refer to. That's not understanding.

I think there's a deep sense of TRUST when you say you believe it's true. You don't know what it really means for it to be true. You couldn't devise an experiment to detect if it were true, or some other formula instead were true.

Sure, you understand that e means energy and m means mass.

Above all it's TRUST. That's what I think. I think you believe first and foremost that the people who are qualified to know what e=mc2 actually means, have determined that its meaning in some sense is both testable, and closely matches test results.

Which is why I asked you to try to believe 勾股定理. If you were able to do that, I believe that would be a similar kind of belief to your belief that e = mc2.

PS I'm actually not trying to shame you. If you don't fully understand what it means to multiply mass by a speed, that's fine, that opens up a really interesting conversation *that I think is worth having*. Your'e allowed to not have a deep conceptual understanding of it, AND you're allowed to think it's true anyway. That's worth talking about. There's no shame in that, I just want to figure out if that's the situation we're in. I'm not criticizing you, just discussing.

Okay, what's it's actual meaning? What does it mean for energy to equal mass times the speed of light squared? What does it mean to multiply mass times the speed of light at all? What does it mean to multiply mass times the speed of light, and then multiply it times the speed of light again?

How would the universe be different if energy wasn't equal to mass times the speed of light timees the speed of light? What if energy was mass times the speed of light cubed? Does that have meaning? What would that mean?

Right, so you don't want to accept the truth of something you don't understand. Interesting.

So when I asked you, "what does it mean to say e = mc2 is true?", I'm looking for some UNDERSTANDING from you about the actual meaning of e=mc2.

And maybe you think it's true without understanding it. There's a way to make sense of that too. Is that the situation your'e in? Do you think e=mc2 is true without understanding any actual meaning of e=mc2?

(and I think it's worth pointing out that understanding each of those symbols in isolation is very different from understanding them all together as a single equation. I'm not asking you if you know that e means energy and m means mass - of course you do. that's trivial.).

I am the OP. — Arcane Sandwich

my bad. I didn't notice that lol

I'm going to give you a bunch of symbols that, presumably, you don't understand. Your first instruction is to NOT LOOK THEM UP. Okay? Don't google, don't use a translation software, nothing. Just look at them on screen and accept that you don't understand them.

在直角三角形中，斜边的平方等于两直角边的平方和。

Now, your second instruction is this: BELIEVE ME. Understand that, despite the fact that you don't know what it means, I'm telling you something that is true to people who do understand those symbols.

And I really am, by the way. Those symbols represent a truth whether you understand them or not. I'm not tricking you.

Can you follow the above instructions? 1. Don't look it up, and 2. Believe me that it represents something true to people who understand the symbols?

And please confirm that you don't understand the symbols. This won't work if you actually do lol.

I actually have an interesting experiment to kind of get at what I'm saying here, if you're interested to learn what I mean. You want to play along and try something with me? I'll ask you to follow a few steps and to trust me. What I'm saying isn't meant to be dismissive, nor meaningless - I actually think there's something at least moderately philosophically meaningful in what I'm saying here, though it might not be easy for me to express why, but if you try this experiment you might understand it a bit more directly.

You up for an experiment?

Is the following a fair reconstruction of your argument? Let's start with that.

(1) There is no ontologically significant difference between E = mc2 and "Garbledy bombley goo". — Arcane Sandwich

nope.

I simply asked what he means. I'm not saying "there is no meaning". I AM saying, "IF there is no understood meaning of e = mc2 THEN there is no difference between E = mc2 and Garbledy bombley goo"

It's a conditional.

There are people in the world for whom e = mc2 has a specific meaning. For those people, E = mc2 and Garbledy bombley goo are not equivalent. Is OP one of those people?