16 Friction-Induced Vibration and Self-Organization
To state his principle of material frame-indifference, Noll develops a “frame-
free formulation of elasticity.” Furthermore, he considers physical space “an
illusion” and provides an interesting parallelism with the Chomskyan psy-
cholinguistic theories of language acquisition:
It should be clear from the above that the existence of a physical
space, apart from any frame of reference, is an illusion. The mystery
is that so many intelligent people, Newton included, fell victim to this
illusion…. I submit that a solution of the mystery of the illusion of
physical space does not come from physics but from psychology and
neural science, and in particular from the way our brain processes
visual i ...