Bah, humbug! ;-] Was: Re: [OT] Happy Holidays

[Cybe R. Wizard]

On Sun, 26 Dec 2010 10:15:48 +0200
Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 01:44, Cybe R. Wizard
> <cyber_wizard at mindspring.com> wrote:
> >> Newton is a unit of force, not mass!
> >>
> > But his seminal work involves forces existing between and affecting
> > masses, the alternate meaning of which [1] may come to involve the
> > entire world in the future.
> >
> 
> Er, not really. Light has no rest mass, yet gravity affects it. Though
> I contend that it wasn't until Einstein that we knew that.

The quantum theory was well after his time, true, but still only
advances and continues his work, does not disprove it on the
macroscopic scale.

...scroll on down...
> 
> I don't think that Newton really did think that gravity is a force
> that affects only objects with mass, though. He was heavily into the
> what we would call "black majic" and that is what led him to believe
> that one object could affect another without touching it. Considering
> that "black magic" was the impetus for the discovery of gravity, and
> that his particular form of "black magic" considered objects other
> than tangible objects as physical objects, it stands to reason that it
> was not the mass that Newton was concerned with as causing the
> gravity.

Dotan, that's plainly wrong as his math for the Second Law of Motion
clearly shows that momentum is the product of rest /mass/ and
velocity:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion#Newton.27s_second_law

...and, although he did believe in occult agencies, he didn't attribute
gravity to any such thing.  
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Mechanics_and_gravitation :
"Newton's postulate of an invisible force able to act over vast
distances led to him being criticised for introducing "occult agencies"
into science.[44] Later, in the second edition of the Principia (1713),
Newton firmly rejected such criticisms in a concluding General
Scholium, writing that it was enough that the phenomena implied a
gravitational attraction, as they did; but they did not so far indicate
its cause, and it was both unnecessary and improper to frame hypotheses
of things that were not implied by the phenomena."

Cybe R. Wizard
-- 
What science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.
	Bertrand Russell