> Halley’s intervention saved science from being reduced to “things fall down because they do” for another century.
Well, that might be stretching it. Speaking as someone who has done a little university level physics the understanding still seems to be basically that things fall because they do - we haven't made much progress beyond a firm strike-through of the word "down".
Newton's contribution was a very precise description of how rapidly they fall, and how we can calculate and understand the direction that things fall in complex multidimensional settings.
To me, the funniest part of why Principica was bankrolled by Edmund Halley is that is was supposed to be funded by the Royal Academy. Only, their previous publishing project "The history of fishes" had faceplanted and they had no money.
Also, when Principica was funded and Halley was himself short on cash, RA decided that they could not afford to actually pay him money (he was the RA secretary). Instead he would get copies of The History of fishes
And, in the last paragraph of the general scholium, the appendix of the Principia, Newton describes electromagnetism and the role of electrical oscillation in the nervous system. It’s actually the root of the the history of “vibes”
“And now we might add something concerning a certain most subtle Spirit, which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies; by the force and action of which Spirit, the particles of bodies mutually attract one another at near distances, and cohere, if contiguous; and electric bodies operate to greater distances, as well repelling as attracting the neighbouring corpuscles; and light is emitted, reflected, refracted, inflected, and heats bodies; and all sensation is excited, and the members of animal bodies move at the command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this Spirit, mutually propagated along the solid filaments of the nerves, from the outward organs of sense to the brain, and from the brain into the muscles. But these are things that cannot be explain'd in few words, nor are we furnish'd with that sufficiency of experiments which is required to an accurate determination and demonstration of the laws by which this electric and elastic spirit operates.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20100524103006/http://www.isaacn...
Back in 1987 I was standing outside Thorns Bookshop in Newcastle upon Tyne.
In its window was a display of books by Professor Paul C. W. Davies.
I was saying to someone beside me that Davies wrote too many books for them to be any good.
Then I turned round and almost bumped into the man himself.
Fortunately he hadn't heard what I'd said and just carried on his way.
He was hurrying to give a lecture at the university commemorating the 300th anniversary of Newton's Principia.
Several years later I was to revise my view of his writings after reading his 'Fifth Miracle' which I enjoyed very much.
For the record, Newton was vastly conceptually wrong which is not the same as saying his work is useless because being wrong in a precise way is science. Time does not "flow immutably from one moment to the next" and there are no gravitational "forces" acting magically at a distance. Even if the linear approximatiins he made hold on a narrow domain they offer little in the way of conceptual framework. In fact, mostly Newton played mathematical parlour tricks.
If you are waiting for science to tell you "why" things happen you will wait forever because science answers "how" things happen.
There is no way for a successor scientific theory to completely subsume all of the predictions of its predecessor because they are often incommensurable. Which is to say that there is simply no way to define one in the terms and concepts of the other.
If you think of GR as some extension or modification of Newton's work you're doomed to misunderstanding the mathematical facts.
Only for a useless definition of "wrong". Modeling reality well is an end in itself, and to the extent that model predicts well and "factors" reality cleanly into distinct mechanisms, it is conceptually right. This is all "conceptually right" needs to mean. You can not, as I'm sure you'll agree, even hope to explain the "root cause" of motion and time-evolution. at some point you have to base any theory on some postulate or assumption about why things happen at all. But the point of work like Newton's is to get things right above that level, and he was enormously successful at this.
> mostly Newton played mathematical parlour tricks.
Only for a useless definition of "parlour tricks". The hard part of new ideas (1) is getting to the point where you're posing the right problem and thinking about it the right way. Once you get that right, the predictions (2) hopefully fall out as simple tricks! Then they have to be validated (3) against data—also hard. Newton pulled off all three, the hard parts and the tricks. Not single-handedly, mind you, but almost.
To bring such a big picture into view and fill out its details with credibility was a monumental task. I think of it as akin to evolution developing a new organ system—the genome usually has to find its way down on a very long limb to get there and to be stable enough to stay there. For a species this can happen over many generations, but for a human thinker it is has to happen by imagining and testing many subsequent ideas. Newton did an enormous amount of this on his own, over decades.
> are often incommensurable
Newton being absorbed into relativity is like the one case where they are commensurable. Newton is a clear limiting case! The "ways of thinking" about reality are perhaps not, but nobody (except cranks) is still stuck on Newtonianism at this point.
> as some extension or modification
Obviously it contains new math and new abstractions, as needed to match empirical reality on new data. Its content doesn't extent logically out of Newton, because how could it? The data wasn't there. But the conceptual gesture of devising a mathematical framework which can handle the data is the same one Newton used.
Postscript: philosophy of science folks always like to show up in physics discourse ready to fight various tired, old battles which mostly mattered in the context of the particular ideological dispute of some decade or another. The matter in question is always how to generalize the success of physics by fitting various philsci "models" to the "data" of physics' history. This can be interesting, but they never contribute much to the physics itself, which has always proceeded by its own internally-coherent and immensely-successful logic.
“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.”
11 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 28.3 ms ] threadWell, that might be stretching it. Speaking as someone who has done a little university level physics the understanding still seems to be basically that things fall because they do - we haven't made much progress beyond a firm strike-through of the word "down".
Newton's contribution was a very precise description of how rapidly they fall, and how we can calculate and understand the direction that things fall in complex multidimensional settings.
Also, when Principica was funded and Halley was himself short on cash, RA decided that they could not afford to actually pay him money (he was the RA secretary). Instead he would get copies of The History of fishes
“And now we might add something concerning a certain most subtle Spirit, which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies; by the force and action of which Spirit, the particles of bodies mutually attract one another at near distances, and cohere, if contiguous; and electric bodies operate to greater distances, as well repelling as attracting the neighbouring corpuscles; and light is emitted, reflected, refracted, inflected, and heats bodies; and all sensation is excited, and the members of animal bodies move at the command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this Spirit, mutually propagated along the solid filaments of the nerves, from the outward organs of sense to the brain, and from the brain into the muscles. But these are things that cannot be explain'd in few words, nor are we furnish'd with that sufficiency of experiments which is required to an accurate determination and demonstration of the laws by which this electric and elastic spirit operates.” https://web.archive.org/web/20100524103006/http://www.isaacn...
If you are waiting for science to tell you "why" things happen you will wait forever because science answers "how" things happen.
There is no way for a successor scientific theory to completely subsume all of the predictions of its predecessor because they are often incommensurable. Which is to say that there is simply no way to define one in the terms and concepts of the other.
If you think of GR as some extension or modification of Newton's work you're doomed to misunderstanding the mathematical facts.
> vastly conceptually wrong
Only for a useless definition of "wrong". Modeling reality well is an end in itself, and to the extent that model predicts well and "factors" reality cleanly into distinct mechanisms, it is conceptually right. This is all "conceptually right" needs to mean. You can not, as I'm sure you'll agree, even hope to explain the "root cause" of motion and time-evolution. at some point you have to base any theory on some postulate or assumption about why things happen at all. But the point of work like Newton's is to get things right above that level, and he was enormously successful at this.
> mostly Newton played mathematical parlour tricks.
Only for a useless definition of "parlour tricks". The hard part of new ideas (1) is getting to the point where you're posing the right problem and thinking about it the right way. Once you get that right, the predictions (2) hopefully fall out as simple tricks! Then they have to be validated (3) against data—also hard. Newton pulled off all three, the hard parts and the tricks. Not single-handedly, mind you, but almost.
To bring such a big picture into view and fill out its details with credibility was a monumental task. I think of it as akin to evolution developing a new organ system—the genome usually has to find its way down on a very long limb to get there and to be stable enough to stay there. For a species this can happen over many generations, but for a human thinker it is has to happen by imagining and testing many subsequent ideas. Newton did an enormous amount of this on his own, over decades.
> are often incommensurable
Newton being absorbed into relativity is like the one case where they are commensurable. Newton is a clear limiting case! The "ways of thinking" about reality are perhaps not, but nobody (except cranks) is still stuck on Newtonianism at this point.
> as some extension or modification
Obviously it contains new math and new abstractions, as needed to match empirical reality on new data. Its content doesn't extent logically out of Newton, because how could it? The data wasn't there. But the conceptual gesture of devising a mathematical framework which can handle the data is the same one Newton used.
Postscript: philosophy of science folks always like to show up in physics discourse ready to fight various tired, old battles which mostly mattered in the context of the particular ideological dispute of some decade or another. The matter in question is always how to generalize the success of physics by fitting various philsci "models" to the "data" of physics' history. This can be interesting, but they never contribute much to the physics itself, which has always proceeded by its own internally-coherent and immensely-successful logic.
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!