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For example, consider a book at rest on a table. The Earth's gravity pulls down upon the book. The "reaction" to that "action" is not the support force from the table holding up the book, but the gravitational pull of the book acting on the Earth. [note 6] Newton's third law relates to a more fundamental principle, the conservation of momentum.
The historic interest of the rotating bucket experiment is its usefulness in suggesting one can detect absolute rotation by observation of the shape of the surface of the water. However, one might question just how rotation brings about this change. Below are two approaches to understanding the concavity of the surface of rotating water in a ...
Newton's style of demonstration in all his writings was rather brief in places; he appeared to assume that certain steps would be found self-evident or obvious. In 'De Motu', as in the first edition of the Principia, Newton did not specifically state a basis for extending the proofs to the converse. The proof of the converse here depends on its ...
A more recent assessment has been that while acceptance of Newton's laws was not immediate, by the end of the century after publication in 1687, "no one could deny that [out of the Principia] a science had emerged that, at least in certain respects, so far exceeded anything that had ever gone before that it stood alone as the ultimate exemplar ...
Further, the current usage of "Kepler's Second Law" is something of a misnomer. Kepler had two versions, related in a qualitative sense: the "distance law" and the "area law". The "area law" is what became the Second Law in the set of three; but Kepler did himself not privilege it in that way. [11]
Finding that an elliptical orbit fit the Mars data (the Vicarious Hypothesis), Kepler immediately concluded that all planets move in ellipses, with the Sun at one focus—his first law of planetary motion. Because he employed no calculating assistants, he did not extend the mathematical analysis beyond Mars.
The laws of nature take a simpler form in inertial frames of reference because in these frames one did not have to introduce inertial forces when writing down Newton's law of motion. [ 42 ] In practice, using a frame of reference based upon the fixed stars as though it were an inertial frame of reference introduces little discrepancy.
Mach's principle says that this is not a coincidence—that there is a physical law that relates the motion of the distant stars to the local inertial frame. If you see all the stars whirling around you, Mach suggests that there is some physical law which would make it so you would feel a centrifugal force.