3 ms·

'Only for a useless definition of "wrong"....' The definition of wrong is given in the second part of the sentence you quote. Newton was usefully wrong in a s

'Only for a useless definition of "wrong"....' The definition of wrong is given in the second part of the sentence you quote. Newton was usefully wrong in a scientific sense; His theory and ontology of time as immutably flowing from moment to moment is fine for beings in a relatively stable gravitational field but fails miserably anywhere else. GR is a theory that gets time less wrong, but entails completely different ontology wherein "forces" disappear. In your parlance, Newton put time below "that level" when he should have lifted it into that which must be reasoned about physically. This means he was wrong conceptually in taking something as an absolute when it was not so. 'Only for a useless definition of "parlour tricks".' If you look at Newton's work it amounts to little more than a first order approximations, rules to model linear portions of a nonlinear reality. I think you have a very romantic picture of Newton's work. Don't get me wrong, Newton was a giant in his time he had mastered linear curve fitting and to some extent I think he knew what he was doing and that it would be supplanted. I actually think if Newton stood here today he would disagree with you, side with me and take up GR straight away. "Newton being absorbed into relativity is like the one case where they are commensurable." Newton's theory was not absorbed, it was supplanted. One cannot absorb the idea of a "force" into GR. This is precisely what incommensurability means. "Obviously it contains new math and new abstractions..." It is not about the data, Newton was wrong because non-euclidian geometry wasn't there, "Postscript" I have degrees in electronic engineering and theoretical physics. I graduated number one in my class both times. I am not a philosophy interloper as you point out in your ad-hominid attack. IF you want to make progress in your understanding of physics you best heed the words and thoughts I have provided.

sixo 1y ago
uh oh we got a badass over here. The point of my argument was to express a "practical" epistemology in which Newton's successes represent exactly what they accomplished, instead of some failure to live up to an ideal "truth", a view which I consider useless and pedantic. > One cannot absorb the idea of a "force" into GR. Yeah you can, tho I never learned the specifics. IIRC, a force is a Lagrange multiplier representing a constraint on the extremization of action. When you extremize a joint system (two particles A and B interacting) you just get some exchange of momentum between them and no force appears. But if you extremize just A w.r.t to a known and fixed trajectory of B, B's influence on A appears as an "external force" term. This is actually all "forces" ever were—constraints relating dp_A/dt and dp_B/dt—but this fact is obscured in Newton because we typically think of systems with their external forces factored out, which of course lets us apply useful approximations for gravity, air resistance, friction, etc. You can certainly do the same operation in GR of isolating a subsystem of a joint system and you will find a "force" term, it has to be there just as a logical consequence of the extremization process. I thought this was well known. Or do you mean "one cannot absorb..." in some other sense? My mistake tagging you as a philsci person, tho. I regret the error!
- d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
  'Yeah you can, tho...' I can do no such thing. The idea of a "force" as known to Newton, being "action at a distance" by "mutual attraction", is not at all present in GR.

sixo 1y ago

uh oh we got a badass over here. The point of my argument was to express a "practical" epistemology in which Newton's successes represent exactly what they accomplished, instead of some failure to live up to an ideal "truth", a view which I consider useless and pedantic. > One cannot absorb the idea of a "force" into GR. Yeah you can, tho I never learned the specifics. IIRC, a force is a Lagrange multiplier representing a constraint on the extremization of action. When you extremize a joint system (two particles A and B interacting) you just get some exchange of momentum between them and no force appears. But if you extremize just A w.r.t to a known and fixed trajectory of B, B's influence on A appears as an "external force" term. This is actually all "forces" ever were—constraints relating dp_A/dt and dp_B/dt—but this fact is obscured in Newton because we typically think of systems with their external forces factored out, which of course lets us apply useful approximations for gravity, air resistance, friction, etc. You can certainly do the same operation in GR of isolating a subsystem of a joint system and you will find a "force" term, it has to be there just as a logical consequence of the extremization process. I thought this was well known. Or do you mean "one cannot absorb..." in some other sense? My mistake tagging you as a philsci person, tho. I regret the error!

d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
'Yeah you can, tho...' I can do no such thing. The idea of a "force" as known to Newton, being "action at a distance" by "mutual attraction", is not at all present in GR.