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> I can't seriously imagine Newton saying .. But he did. He called it Gravity. He didn't let figuring out "how gravity works" hold him back. He just figured o
by rusk 8y ago
> I can't seriously imagine Newton saying ..
But he did. He called it Gravity.
He didn't let figuring out "how gravity works" hold him back. He just figured out the equations that predict its effects based on observation. The unknowns happened to conveniently coalesce around a single constant G, but that doesn't make them "known".
[IANAP - do we have any convincing popularly accessible models for how gravity works even today?]
Anyway, that's kind of similar to going "oh I don't understand the subatomic mechanism that is causing this interference pattern, but the pattern itself is consistent so lets call that P!".
Unless I completely sped past the point you were trying to make - which is completely possible at this subatomic level of reasoning (-:
- dotancohen 8y agoActually, both you and GP got it wrong. There is no need to speculate what Newton was thinking, it was all recorded. Newton was looking for methods to manipulate (push, pull) objects at a distance without touching them. He had strong ideas about the occult and what we today call black magic, in addition to being an alchemist. He devised that the Earth was manipulating the untouched Moon (capitalized, proper noun) and sought to explain the influence of the Earth on the Moon.
- rusk 8y agoLOL is that for real! Please please can you give me a couple of good citations for that?
- dotancohen 8y agoInterestingly, I thought that I could simply point you towards Wikipedia [1] and call it a day. However, obviously Newton's viewpoints were controversial in his day and remain so. The controversy is hinted at in Wikipedia, without details. Even the "History of gravitational theory" [2] article completely eliminates this aspect and the "Newton's law of universal gravitation" concentrates completely on the dispute with Hooke. Many science-related articles on Wikipedia suffer from good-meaning but over-zealous gatekeeping of religious influences on science. So I'll just recommend to you to read a biography or three on Newton. His entire story is fascinating and we can see how tiny events in his childhood (death of father, influence of priest uncle) have affected the history of physics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gravitational_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gravitational_theor... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gravitation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gr...