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“In the 337 years since, Newton’s ideas have been used for all sorts of fussy yet vital activities: building bridges that don’t collapse, plotting planetary orb
by mattmaroon 1y ago
“In the 337 years since, Newton’s ideas have been used for all sorts of fussy yet vital activities: building bridges that don’t collapse, plotting planetary orbits, and explaining why toast inevitably lands butter-side down.
NASA still uses Newton’s framework today. They strap adventurous humans into enormous cylinders, set off controlled explosions underneath, and fling them into space—because three centuries later, it’s still the best idea we’ve got.”
Someone should tell them about relativity!
- TMEHpodcast 1y agoRelativity isn’t needed because rockets never get anywhere near the speeds or gravitational extremes where Einstein’s equations matter. At rocket speeds, Newtonian mechanics is so accurate the difference is negligible, so why make things harder? NASA sticks with Newton because it’s simpler, faster to calculate, and gets the job done perfectly for launching rockets into orbit.
- mattmaroon 1y agoIt was just ELI5-style writing and I was being tongue in cheek about it. Newtonian physics are fine for determining how much propellant will launch a rocket into orbit, but you couldn’t build a GPS satellite without accounting for space time distortion. NASA does a lot of things.
- xandrius 1y agoCouldn't you engineer that away with a bunch of magical numbers? I'm curious.
- mattmaroon 1y agoWell, you can’t get to a GPS using Newtonian physics alone because of gravitational time dilation. The clock in space runs at a different speed than the clock on earth. If they tried, scientists could perhaps have come up with some sort of fudge factor (like what I think they do with dark matter) and made it work, sure. But it would have been really confusing to them when they figured out that all the clocks in space run at a different speed than the same clocks on earth. Relativity plays a big role in astronomy too. One of the big questions in physics in Einstein’s day was why the planets didn’t appear exactly where you expected given Newtonian laws. Becoming spacefaring without general relativity would have been difficult.