Re: Late 17th-century physics question
- From: srp@xxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 27 Nov 2006 09:28:30 -0800
Front Office a écrit :
Isaac Newton's Universal Gravitation was maligned during his life
as "invoking occult agencies" because of its force-at-a-distance
aspect.
Actually, the point that was more specifically maligned was the
"instantaneity" of the force-at-a-distance that underlies his theory.
In those days, force was considered to be conveyed ONLY by
actual physical contact between material bodies.
He was the first indeed to postulate a force acting without a
physical medium being the vehicle. At the time, it was still
unclarified whether or not vacuum involved a possibly carrier
underlying medium or not.
Does anyone know how the forces associated with magnetism
and electricity were explained in those days?
They were unknown at the time. Coulomb, for example who
measured the electrostatic force came much later. Then
came Faraday for magnetic force and Maxwell who synthesized
the work of Ampere, Gauss, Coulomb and Faraday.
Interestingly, the electrostatic "force" obeys the same inverse
square law of distance as Newton's gravitation, and it can even
be mathematically proven that both are the same in atoms.
But even today, instantaneous force-at-a-distance is generally
rejected (with no reason other than it seems to hurt reason and
current knowledge base, in other word, it is rejected out of hand
for no scientific reason)
Somewhat ironic, since the same group easily welcomed
entanglement which involves instantaneous communication-
at-a-distance between two unsentient particles.
André Michaud
.
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