[FRIAM] invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice needed)

[David Eric Smith]

Nick wrote:

> "F=ma" is not a model.  

I worked under a professor, for many years, at U.T. Austin, helping him design an intro-to-modern-physics course for the liberal arts honors major.  It was a very successful coarse, producing many students who remained in humanities or literature and had a strong conceptual understanding of what the scientists were doing, and each year a few others who transferred into science or math, and who now have much more secure academic positions than will ever be available to someone like me.

The professor (also named Austin), used to introduce this law by saying its important commitment was the possibility to divide an object from an external world.  That there could be unlimited complexity in what aspects of the external world went into the F, compatible with the fact that only one aspect of the object, encapsulated in m, and one aspect of the object’s embedding in the world, encapsulated in a, would govern the response.

Sometime later we would do general relativity, mentioning that Galileo had already presaged a certain delicacy in the Newton construction, when for gravity we could write F = mg, and cancel the m from both sides.  So sometimes one cuts the object and the external world between ma and F, and other times one just does geometry, as in Galileo’s a = g.

Of course, I don’t know what makes something “a model” or “not a model” in the lexicon you prefer to use to speak carefully, but I thought that this professor’s way of introducing the idea to the students was quite nice; much better than just starting with ladders against walls and computing forces and frictions and so forth, as would have been done within the physics major.

Eric 




> 
> Nick 
> 
> Nicholas Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
> Clark University
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
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> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
> Sent: Sunday, July 12, 2020 11:40 AM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] invoking quantum woo (was Book publishing advice
> needed)
> 
> Nick,
> 
> It has been said that Newton's mechanics "explain nothing and describe
> everything", where Leibniz's monads "explain everything and describe
> nothing". With regards to Newton, this position seems a bit strong to me.
> His *description* of falling bodies describes (in a forward direction, say)
> by assuming the geometry of the greeks and tracing the paths of bodies. With
> a beer or two in me, I could argue that his *explanation* of falling bodies
> explains (in the reverse direction) by comparing the trajectory of his
> falling body to the trajectory of our own Earth and moon and then claim that
> this is *because* Earths and moons are like Euclid's point and connected by
> Euclid's line. Is this just bad thinking?
> 
> Jon
> 
> 
> 
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