Word: newtonian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Cohen received the award for his study on "Franklin and Newton, An Enquiry into Speculative Newtonian Experimental Science and Franklin's Work in Electricity as an Example Thereof...
...make Newton's physics work, scientists presumed the existence of a substance called ether, which they thought was necessary to carry light waves through space. But experiments soon proved that ether does not exist. Scientists were plunged into a paralyzing dilemma, caught between their reliance on the old Newtonian concept and the undisputable results of their experiments. For close to 20 years they floated in an etherless void...
...thought. In the 1880s, "nearly everything was supposed to be known about physics that could be known ... By the middle of the 1890s, there were a few tremors, a slight shiver as of all not being quite secure, but no one sensed what was coming. By 1900 the Newtonian physics were demolished, done for! ... I have been fooled once, and I'll be damned if I'll be fooled again! . . . There is no more reason to suppose that Einstein's relativity is anything final than Newton's Principia. The danger is dogmatic thought; it plays...
Opening up the profund mysteries of Newtonian physics or thermodynamics to an audience that once thought itself incapable of such heady stuff, LeCorbeiller tosses in Einstein, Euclid, Plato, or Aristotle wherever they are relevant--and often with a sudden thrust of refreshing Gallic humor...
...basic error. Northrop is not alone in finding this error in John Locke, whose 17th Century philosophy contained the premises of Jeffersonian democracy, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The error consisted in the theory that "physical substances" (space, planets, flowers) are definable only in Newtonian terms (extension, mass, volume), thus have no sensuous qualities (depth, heat, fragrance) but are supplied with them by the "mental substance" of the observer...