To be fair, if you don't know about how gravity works, you would just hold up a rock, drop it, and say obviously things can move without someone moving it.
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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And that objects in motion will stay in motion, but our experience with friction tells us otherwise. Ask any kid and they'll say from intuition that the object will stop
No one really understands anything about Physics until you hear Fenyman explain it.
Mystic forces surround us!
Clearly it's buoyancy and something something equilibrium.
You mean luminiferous aether, right?
Oh shit you know my guy Robert Hooke? He's got the best shit this side of London.
I think the more interesting thing is that a moving object will keep moving at constant speed unless a force is applied to it.
Like, um, the friction against the ground that the object is moving on. Isaac Newton observed commonplace phenomena then figured out the scientific reasoning behind the phenomena then put it all into words that we now quote as time-tested & true scientific dogma.
Then Einstein comes in and says everything is moving at a constant spacetime velocity, and that friction isn't a real force.
Friction is real, it's the "force" of gravity that is an illusion.
True, like any good physicist, which I am not, I skipped the explanation of physics world. I was trying to be more funny than clever.
Einstein was a bit of a bad boy
Gravity, not friction!
It was his math contributions people liked. Particularly his invention of calculus which could be used to solve a plethora of unsolved math problems. It's not because he said things fell.
Isaac Newton invented meth????
On the other hand, spontaneous generation was very much still a thing at this point, so a lot of the basic rules of the world around us were really not worked out yet
it was not discredited until the work of the French chemist Louis Pasteur and the Irish physicist John Tyndall in the mid-19th century.
There was a post on lemmy the other day about things that get their names from real people. I forgot that "pasteurize" was also one
gerrymander is always a weird one, I dunno if flanderization counts but I'll just leave it here
Defini-diddilly does, Lemmarino!
I love that Newton had to invent calculus twice, because he was trying to teach it to someone else and they weren't getting it, so Isaac got frustrated and threw the only copy of his notes into the lit fireplace.
It turned out in his favour, because he then discovered that if you throw things in a fire, they burn.
TBF, that's actually a pretty profound insight.
Most, if not all, of us take certain concepts for granted until someone points out that it's more complex than we realise. Examples like Dark Energy & Matter, entropy, the placebo effect, the nature of mathematical objects, etc. are proof of this.
we also live in a world which has now known that premise and used it for 300 years, which makes it seem much more trivial than it was at the time.
It's not unless. It's until, which has more implications.
That's not Newton's contribution. Aristotle already said that an object only moves if a force acts upon it.
In fairness, at the time, many Europeans believed in faries and other creatures, including these guys:
https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/720095/view/mythical-horned-beasts-17th-century
So, not much has changed then....
Yeah interesting thought there actually. In absolute numbers I wager more people believe in mythical beings of some form today in Europe than the 1700s. But as a share of the total population it's going to be a lot lower, of course.
Is it going to be a lower percentage of the total population though? There's a lot about ye olde days that kinda gets generalised, and hand-waved. Like people's ability to read in medieval times. Sure it wasn't as prevalent as today, but reading was probably a lot more common than most people think.
As for belief in mythical beings, who knows, religious belief was a lot stronger in the 1700s, but that doesn't necessarily mean everyone believed in the fae.
Gibson said "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed."
The future was there with Newton, but it's still not evenly distributed 400 years later.
Touché!
Gödel: "Using logic ive shown that there will always be true statements can not be proven/falsifiable within any formal system of logic"
Mathematicians:
Is that one as intuitive, though? I haven't ever heard an intuitive explanation for it.
"Your Grace, he has sinned against the church!"
If anything was going to get Newton in trouble with the Church, it would have been his lifelong obsession with alchemy, not his three laws.
Xenophon of Athens: he who talks shit will therefore get hit.
I prefer the biblical version:
"Hear ye, hear ye, if he who is not humbled before the Lord shall fucketh around, surely I tell you that he shall findeth out."
-DudeYou'reOntoMe 33:16 (Lebron James version)
This actually wasn’t obvious at all. If I let go of an apple in midair, it falls. Why? Nothing appeared to be acting on it. The “common sense” explanation is that things naturally fall. Their “default” action is to move toward the earth. That’s why there are explanations from ancient myths about the sun and stars being “hung” in the sky. Cause otherwise, they would fall to earth too, right? Everything does.
What Newton did was to show that there is a force acting on the apple, and without that force, it wouldn’t move. He also came up with an equation that could predict what that force would be between any two objects at any distance, and what motion or lack of motion would result from that force.
Can someone put this guy next to monkey Jesus?
This is so bad.
its like how the idea of putting one number in front of another for a tens or hundreds figure seems so obvious but took forever to invent
Yeah, it really feels like every toddler figures this out for themselves. He just said it succinctly.