Re: more squiggly lines

["Gunnar Tomasson" <gunnar.tomasson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Alan:

Re. the following:

> On Mon, 29 Jul 2002 18:07:31 -0400 Gunnar Tomasson
<gunnar.tomasson@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > My offer stands:
>
> >>> I shall be pleased to respond to any substantive comment you may have
on
> > my
> >>> proposition that Newton's Equations were, are, and will ever remain
> >>> DESCRIPTIVE - that is, NON-EXPLANATORY - of observed orbital
mechanics.
>
>
> But you are not pleased to do so. I said:
>     So perhaps you are claiming merely that some
>     descriptions are not explanatory and that while Newton felt himself to
>     be both explaining and describing planetary motion, you know better:
>     he was really giving *only* a description.

Newton "felt himself to be" doing no such thing - for, as detailed by one of
his modern biographers, Gale Christianson, the record "tend[s] to prove that
Newton never believed his natural philosophy had been brought to a
satisfactory end, a painful thought, which he carried with him to the
grave."  ('In the Presence of the Creator', The Free Press, New York, 1984,
p. 570)

Indeed, Newton kept working on the Moon's orbital mechanics until his final
days.  Alas, we don't know why Newton was concerned that his Principia work
was unsatisfactory - apparently, Newton's working papers on the subject
matter did not survive along with his voluminous working papers on biblical
prophecy etc. which Keynes would later acquire and study.

Considering Newton's towering ego and contempt for "second inventors", I
have long suspected that these working papers were committed to the flames
when, on one of his "progressively rarer visits" to the Mint in London,
Newton "burned several boxes of papers, the unknown contents of which have
troubled the sleep of Newton scholars ever since." (Op. cit., p. 574)

Why Newton's concern?

We will never know - but as one who claimed to abide by that "rule of
reasoning in philosophy" which demands that "We are certainly not to
relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain
fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of
Nature, which is wont to be simple, and always consonant to itself," Newton
could not have been oblivious to his own blatant violation thereof in his
work on the Moon's orbital mechanics, as reflected, inter alia, in the
following commentary at the outset of Book Three of Principia:

After elaborating the mathematical fine points of his 'Proposition 4.
Theorem 4', which holds "That the moon gravitates towards the earth, and by
the force of gravity is continually drawn off from a rectilinear motion, and
retained in its orbit," Newton effectively acknowledged that, in this case,
he had NOT abided by "the analogy of Nature" aspect -

"This calculus is founded on the hypothesis of the EARTH'S STANDING STILL,"
Newton wrote and proceeded directly to a mathematical argument which he
prefaced as follows: "for if both EARTH and moon MOVE about the sun, and at
the same time ABOUT THEIR COMMON CENTRE OF GRAVITY...."

Hence my conclusion:

Equations predicated on the COUNTER-FACTUAL pre-supposition of "the Earth's
standing still" - rather than moving about the Earth-Moon System's center of
gravity - cannot in principle be EXPLANATORY of the true physical FACTS
involved.

Gunnar


----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan G Isaac" <aisaac@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <pkt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, July 29, 2002 10:15 PM
Subject: Re: more squiggly lines