Warren Smith wrote:
The bullet that annihilates the leader, follows a line segment in the time-space plane. This line segment totally separates what came before & what follows. The new stuff is a total restart, totally independent of all the previous stuff.
Really? If "before" means "before the time at which that bullet is fired" or something of the kind: the line segment doesn't separate "before" from "after" because it's at an angle. If "before" means "on the earlier side of the line segment": the line segment does separate "before" from "after" but that doesn't make "before" and "after" independent, because e.g. if the-bullet-that-annihilates-the-leader leaves at time t then a superfast bullet at time t+1 would hit *that* bullet, making it not annihilate the leader after all. So conditional on that bullet actually annihilating the leader, there are speed constraints on bullets fired shortly after that one that weren't there at time t=0. Am I missing something here? -- g