Born to do Math 130 – Newton Limited By Era
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/01
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How was Newton limited by his period, his time?
Rick Rosner: One was observational limitations. Newton as in the 17th century. We didn’t know there were other galaxies until the 1910s or 1920s. It was 250 years away until we knew about other galaxies.
Thing two, he was building an entire cosmology in the absence of any other reasonable cosmology, any other mathematics based cosmology. You had the Copernican system and Kepler’s laws. They were not a cosmology.
They were some rules for planets. Newton came up with Universal Gravitation, which includes his assumption that in an infinite universe; all of the stars spanning across infinity would keep each other from collapsing into a point because the local stars would pull on each other and the other stars would be keeping you stable.
But if you the universe can contract even if the universe is infinite, you can imagine an infinity shrinking. I guess that argument there. Given all Newton had to do, he didn’t have time for that shit. He didn’t have time to consider the greater implications of his cosmology.
To simplify stuff to the point where he was comfortable with it, he assumed a fixed space against which his physics played out. I read that he considered the idea of space and the entire world as determined by the matter within it.
It just wasn’t a fixed space that did shit within but that matter had something to do with the structure of space. I guess that’s possible. If he had considered it, I think he backed away from it because it was too much (!) for him to deal with at the time.
Because there was no precedent for what he was doing. He made simplifying assumptions. It was a lack of information and history of building cosmologies that worked against him. If you gave me time, I could come up with 2 or 3 other limitations.
He didn’t know about atoms. Would have knowing about atoms have helped him? He did work in optics. Atomic knowledge would have helped him there. Light rays are emitted when an electron drops an energy level orbiting around an atom, which means he could have been helped by knowing quantum physics.
All that stuff was more than 200 years in the future. So there you go. Newton.
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