> I'm trying not to be a smart aleck and instead I'm putting the question into terms anyone who's finished high school would understand.
How's it being a smart aleck? A geodesic is a very easy concept to understand. Not only that, but it's ridiculous to dumb down information when the whole point of the conversation was to understand truths. If this question was on history concepts, and you said that Columbus discovered America, it would be a bit ridiculous for you to criticize me on calling you out on it, right? A straight line being the shortest distance between two points is about as true as Columbus discovering America. You have to add on a bunch of qualifiers for either to be remotely true.
> We're not talking general relativity here, we're just talking about plain Euclidean geometry.
See this is the thing, you don't even need to understand general relativity to understand this. Airplane pilots understand this, they fly on great circles because of this concept, which has absolutely nothing to do with general relativity.
> or maybe everyone except you
Or maybe anyone with a math degree, 4 or 5 physics classes, an aerospace degree, airplane pilots, optical engineers. It's really not that esoteric.
How's it being a smart aleck? A geodesic is a very easy concept to understand. Not only that, but it's ridiculous to dumb down information when the whole point of the conversation was to understand truths. If this question was on history concepts, and you said that Columbus discovered America, it would be a bit ridiculous for you to criticize me on calling you out on it, right? A straight line being the shortest distance between two points is about as true as Columbus discovering America. You have to add on a bunch of qualifiers for either to be remotely true.
> We're not talking general relativity here, we're just talking about plain Euclidean geometry.
See this is the thing, you don't even need to understand general relativity to understand this. Airplane pilots understand this, they fly on great circles because of this concept, which has absolutely nothing to do with general relativity.
> or maybe everyone except you
Or maybe anyone with a math degree, 4 or 5 physics classes, an aerospace degree, airplane pilots, optical engineers. It's really not that esoteric.