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

[Dotan Cohen]

On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 11:07, Cybe R. Wizard
<cyber_wizard at mindspring.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>

I would say the opposite: Newtons laws of physics are simplifications
that fit the timescales of human interaction for objects a few tens of
orders of magnitude within human mass. They certainly do _not_ hold
true on the subatomic scale, and it is tenuous if they hold true on
the galactic scale.


>> 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
>

Hmm, you are right. It is clear right from here that mass is the cause.


> ...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."
>

As your quote points out, Newton did  "introduce occult agencies into
science" only to redact them under pressure. That quite suggests that
his belief was in the occult phenomenon.

Or, I could word it as an Elf had once mentioned to a Hobbit: any
technology that we don't understand get attributed to magic. So maybe
for Newton, it _was_ magic. But then we came to understand it. Well,
more of it, until we find a nice GUT that includes gravity, it might
as well still be magic.

In any case, all this conjecture has gone off course (though it was
fun, I like intellectual discussion, especially when I'm on the
defensive!). If we continue, let's do it on sounder, please CC me if
you post a reply there. Thanks!

-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://gibberish.co.il
http://what-is-what.com