Word: newton
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...Newton's laws were high-school simple. He assumed the existence of two independent entities-mass and force, which interacted as follows...
Upon these basic rules (and others closely related), physicists built an imposing structure of knowledge. They predicted the motions of the earth, the moon, the planets. They derived a maze of useful mechanical sub-laws. They explained the behavior of gases, and discovered the nature of heat. Newton's laws did not account for everything, but the physicists felt that this was due to their own ignorance. Eventually, they were sure, all phenomena could be explained in Newton's terms...
...nearly 20 years, the physicists worked hard to "save" the ether. But the ether could not be saved, and with it went the authority of Newton's scientific decalogue, which depended upon it. Science, the guiding mind of technological civilization, was in crisis...
Albert Einstein, then an unknown clerk in a Swiss patent office, rescued science. In his Theory of Special Relativity (1905) he abandoned Newton's assumption of independent mass and force. In its place he put the assumption, well supported by observation, that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant, no matter what the speed of its source...
...that time nearly all physicists agreed that light consisted of waves whose properties had been observed in great detail. The old theory (favored by Newton) that light was speeding corpuscles had been abandoned. But the theory had one great advantage: corpuscles can move through space by themselves. Unlike waves, they need no medium to carry them...