@maxdancona,
maxdancona wrote:
I could explain how Newton's Third Law really works, and why you are wrong. I will do so if you feel it would actually be useful to you. As a Physics teacher I taught Newton's laws to many students. The problem is that you are here to argue against science. That makes it rather difficult for you to learn anything.
You don't understand science. To you it is just another authoritarian culture.
Quote:Newton's Laws work perfectly well in any real world circumstance (where speeds don't approach light speed). Newton's laws work with airplanes traveling through the air, or boats travelling through water or space craft with almost zero friction. We know this because scientists use Newton's laws to design both aircraft and cars and space craft.
We were talking about factuality and truth. Now you're talking about practical application. They are not the same thing.
Quote:You can continue believing that Newton's laws work everywhere(*) because there is some conspiracy among educated scientists. Or you can accept that they work because we've tested them and they explain how reality works in case (other than with near light speeds).
Again, you posted a thread about a 'post-fact society' and now you are skirting the issues of truth and factuality in favor of practicality.
Quote:Would it be worthwhile for me to explain how Newton's Third Law works? Maybe this would be another thread. The students in my Physics class actually ran the experiments, we set up a number of different types of collisions and other interactions between objects. The students measured that Newton's Third Law applied perfectly in each case.
That doesn't address how Newton modeled motion in terms of a hypothetical vacuum populated by interacting (and reacting) objects.
The first law is a teaser suggesting that such a thing as totally-frictionless motion through a vacuum is a possible occurrence in reality. Then, in the third law, he accounts for friction by noting that every action includes an equal and opposite reaction.
You have to take the first and third law together to get a true theory about how real motion works. The first law alone could not stand up to empirical testing, because no object in any situation could ever move through a vacuum without encountering equal-and-opposite reactions that cause it friction.
The idea that an object is moving through a frictionless vacuum intermittently between isolated moments in which it encounters equal-and-opposite reactions that counteract its momentum is extremely useful to facilitate quantification and math, but in reality there are no actual moments of frictionless motion. Motion is always in dialogue with some form of friction or other. Can you acknowledge that as a fact or would you need to send students around the universe for a few thousand years testing for friction in relatively vacuous spots?
Quote:There are right answers in Science. You learn them by education. Newton's laws give you the correct answer (and the only correct answer) in any circumstance not involving near light speeds.
It's not about the math and how well it works. It is about the relationship between the theoretical laws and whether real, observable motion actually ever occurs in a vacuum "until it encounters external force."
If no such situation ever actually occurs in reality, that doesn't make the theory any worse in terms of its predictive strength, but it just means that the first law can't stand up to empirical observation without taking account of the third law as well.
In fact, the hypothesis of unimpeded momentum maintain speed on its own purely by inertia is an extremely useful concept - but didn't you say that Aristotle had actually already described such inertial motion as 'natural motion' or something to that effect?
edit: I just googled it and it seems that 'natural' and 'violent' classify motion according to whether the motion is propelled by an objects inherent inertia or whether it is being propelled by external force. This is a logical differentiation that need not take account of 'equal and opposite reactions' to the extent that friction must be assumed in all situations. It seems the major issue for Aristotle lay in whether the object would move through a medium by force of its own inertia/momentum; or whether external force was required to move the object in a situation where friction would otherwise impede motion.