boy playing with a proton gun 977 a spacecraft leaves a space station and travels at a speed of 0.80 c in a direction that is 30° away from the +x direction. if a boy in the spaceship shoots a proton gun with protons having a speed of 0.5 e, what is the speed of the protons measured by the observer at rest on the space station when the gun is shot (a) toward the observer on the station? (b) toward the floor of the spaceship?

relativism, roughly put, is the view that truth and falsity, right and wrong, standards of reasoning, and procedures of justification are products of differing conventions and frameworks of assessment and that their authority is confined to the context giving rise to them. more precisely, “relativism” covers views which maintain that—at a high level of abstraction—at least some class of things have the properties they have (e.g., beautiful, morally good, epistemically justified) not simpliciter, but only relative to a given framework of assessment (e.g., local cultural norms, individual standards), and correspondingly, that the truth of claims attributing these properties holds only once the relevant framework of assessment is specified or supplied. relativists characteristically insist, furthermore, that if something is only relatively so, then there can be no framework-independent vantage point from which the matter of whether the thing in question is so can be established.

relativism has been, in its various guises, both one of the most popular and most reviled philosophical doctrines of our time. defenders see it as a harbinger of tolerance and the only ethical and epistemic stance worthy of the open-minded and tolerant. detractors dismiss it for its alleged incoherence and uncritical intellectual permissiveness. debates about relativism permeate the whole spectrum of philosophical sub-disciplines. from ethics to epistemology, science to religion, political theory to ontology, theories of meaning and even logic, philosophy has felt the need to respond to this heady and seemingly subversive idea. discussions of relativism often also invoke considerations relevant to the very nature and methodology of philosophy and to the division between the so-called “analytic and continental” camps in philosophy. and yet, despite a long history of debate going back to plato and an increasingly large body of writing, it is still difficult to come to an agreed definition of what, at its core, relativism is, and what philosophical import it has. this entry attempts to provide a broad account of the many ways in which “relativism” has been defined, explained, defended and criticized.

explanation:

the order for strong to weak forces such as

strong nuclear force → electromegnetic force → weak nuclear force → gravitational force

the fundamental forces are those forces that act between to objects or element to make interactions. there are four types of fundamental forces such as strong and weak nuclear forces (due to protons and electrons), electromagnetic force (due to the motion of electrons) and gravitational force (due to orbital movement of the planet). if these forces are arranged on the basis of their maximum strength then the order is

strong nuclear force → electromegnetic force → weak nuclear force → gravitational force