The world is supposed to be composed of two classes of bodies: terrestrial and celestial. The force of gravity (g = 9.8 m/seg^2 ) acts upon terrestrial bodies, and the force GMm/r^2 acts upon celestial bodies. He showed, beautifully, that those two forces are not two forces, but one and the same force. That was the first example of unification of forces in the history of physics.

Now, since there is no difference between the two forces, there is no difference between terrestrial and celestial bodies. He showed that the Moon gravitates, so that it is like terrestrial bodies. But what impresses me most is the other, parallel idea: that the apple is like celestial bodies. We, terrestrial beings, are part of the Universe, just as the planets are. Before Newton the world was supposed to be a cosmos (terrestrial and celestial bodies obeying different laws); after Newton the world is a universe (all bodies obeying the same rules).

Notice that Newton´s proof depends crucially on a detail that he does not mention explicitly in Proposition IV: that the force exerted by the Earth is as if all its mass was concentrated in the center of the sphere.

The Errors & Animadversions of Honest Isaac Newton by Sheldon Lee Glashow

ABSTRACT:

Isaac Newton was my childhood hero. Along with Albert Einstein, he one of the greatest scientists ever, but Newton was no saint. He used his position to defame his competitors and rarely credited his colleagues.His arguments were sometimes false and contrived, his data were often fudged, and he exaggerated the accuracy of his calculations. Furthermore, his many religious works (mostly unpublished) were nonsensical or mystical, revealing him to be a creationist at heart. My talk offers a sampling of Newton’s many transgressions, social, scientific and religious.

I was afraid the scientific basis of Sir Isaac Newton may be clouded by the character he enshrined? Sometimes, things are allowed to go by the way side because of the character flaws or directions reputable scientists may go, after leading a scientific life. Character, is not excusable either?

Reading John’s Ramsden reasons for the
“primitive alchemical work or astrology” in what he relates to the “time and the country,” are important I think, and this leads into what is of value in our culture if we understood the value to the EQ instead of the IQ.

Not so much the process of astrology for sure here, because we may have never had understood it’s alchemical relations but by the woodcuts that we had been shown previous, by the assumption of the culture people of that time.

I do not know if this leads into Tom’s new post above, but the relevant basis of, “calculus by invention” is a testament to “looking past” the work and history of the character of Sir Isaac Newton. Fully acknowledging the work any of us to do with what “is” primitive in us.

This does not discount the roles to validation, but points out the work to bypass the emotive realizations that existed with Sir Isaac Newton, as we work together, what ever your arena as an “subjective valuation” and hence repugnant to what is intelligent today by elevating the genius standard, while discounting the creative valuations one might assign to new theories, any group that gathers in front of the blackboard under the basis of this emotive consideration.

Scientist or not. There is a conduciveness to growth in science and technologies that works it’s way into the social network by nurturing. The emotive valuations must be understood by learning to know what makes one tick in emotive response.

I blew the link to the Wilczek series. It’s here: http://xserver2.lns.mit.edu/~csuggs/physics_today/wilczekpubs.html. Scroll to the bottom for the three articles in quesiton.

Thanks, interesting. Frank pondered these problems in his youth. It took me a bit more time to ponder this. This funniness in F = ma is one motivation for eliminating force from the foundations of physics. I also think that physics needs to liberalize the idea of inertial frames, or to remove the dichotomy between accelerated and inertial frames.

It is hard to know who was the first cosmologist. For that matter we could argue over whether Galileo or Newton get the title of the first physicist. Galileo figured out some simple rules for motion on Earth. Kepler found the rules for planetary motion. Newton with his F = ma assumed a gravity law of the form F = GMmr^n, equated this to the centripetal acceleration and found that n = -2 recovered Kepler’s laws. So we might say that Newton unified a physics (protophysics) with a cosmology, which extended out to Saturn.

That all of this early solar system is amazing has to be seen in the light of how long it took to actually figure it out. Watching the sky leads one to a quick conclusion that everything does go around the Earth. What could be more natural? The problem lay in those pesky planets, they just didn’t seem to fit the rule. It took some time to begin to understand the motion of the planets against the sky and how the solar system was heliocentric. It is also fortunate that the ancient Hebrews made little commentary about the sky or stars. In fact they admonished against astrology, which is what the story of the Tower of Babel is about. Galileo challenged Papal scholarship and not so much the core of theology.

Biology is less fortunate, for Darwin is more of a direct challenge to theology, as seen in the continued silly fuss in the United States with evolution vs creationism.

Lawrence B. Crowell

what would make current physical ideas as powerful and as intelligibly strange as Newton was able to make his story of a comet traveling from and to distances with out limit?

Given that Newton and his contemporaries made the first big successes of basing physics and similar sciences on specific mathematical laws, maybe the biggest turnaround today or hereafter would be unassailable evidence that fundamental laws were statistical and random.

Not saying I believe that, and probably the vast majority of scientists today don’t either (although there was a recent ArXiV paper that made a fair stab at predicting the cosmic proportions of mass types, on a similar assumption of a random ensemble of laws).

No doubt for a long time scientists would assume the randomness was a consequence of underlying deterministic laws, and seek “hidden law” theories analogous to now discredited hidden variable theories in QM. But perhaps that idea would eventually become as anachronous and unfruitful as astrology did after Newton (who dabbled in the occult himself). And consider how popular all that hocus pocus still is today, although unlike that the by-then old-style deterministic science would still of course be useful for most practical purposes.

I look forward to your book on Newton and the Royal Mint, Tom. But let’s hope you’re not too harsh on the cantankerous old coot - As you must be all too aware, after researching for the book, “the past is another country”. In Newton’s case it was one with no police force to speak of, hardly any social security, general illiteracy and poverty, and prisons so insanitary they were death traps in themselves.

So inevitably, the law in those days was harsher than many today can imagine. Practically every crime was a felony, and almost every felony was a capital offence (over 300 a mere two hundred years ago!). As well as death, conviction meant forfeiture of all goods and chattels; so a condemned man’s family, if any, would end up literally on the street!

Some of the offences were considered ridiculous even then, and for most types of offence only about 20% of death sentences ended up being carried out - If a person of standing, like the local vicar or squire, put in a good word for a condemned felon, a reprieve was more than likely (this mercy being a form of social control in itself, a kind of carrot to go with the stick).

But one crime for which conviction meant almost certain death was forgery. Also, forgery of precious metal coinage was treason, which meant the execution was more grisly: Men were hanged, drawn, and quartered, and women were burned at the stake, and this happened quite often, almost into the 19th century. Although most forgers were male, their womenfolk were often implicated when the authorities found forgery equipment in their possession. (Unluckily for the women, one can’t be an accessory to treason.)

Well, I hope that didn’t go too far off on a tangent, and will look forward to buying the book.

Newton’s inverse-square (1/r2) law is a cornerstone of General Relativity.

I was going to include the mathematical derivative as well, in case there were other layman like myself reading.

Also: to Mark Harrison — I’ve done the “you come from stars” thing with great pleasure in the NOVA film I did with Neil Tyson on Origins; you’re right. It works. I’d venture to say, though, that the strangeness quotient in both the thought and the underlying physics is pretty high — which is part of its appeal.