Unlike Einstein, Newton wasn’t guessing; he was measuring.
Your experiment didn’t disprove F = ma; it simply failed to test it properly. Rather than refuting Newton, it revealed a misunderstanding of what he clearly stated: a steady net force on a constant mass yields a steady change in motion; a principle he verified experimentally, not merely assumed.
You also imply Newton didn’t conduct experiments. Yet, as Chittenden wrote in his Life of Sir Isaac Newton (1846), “[of] all the books [Newton] ever wrote, there was one of colours and light, established upon thousands of experiments which he had been twenty years of making, and which had cost him many hundreds of pounds.”
And that was only his work on optics. If £200 then could buy a modest house, how do your backyard trials compare?
Had you so much as opened the Principia, you’d have seen that the distinction between mass and weight is literally on page one, where Definition I states:
“The quantity of matter is the measure of the same, arising from its density and bulk conjunctly… It is this quantity that I mean hereafter everywhere under the name of body or mass. And the same is known by the weight of each body; for it is proportional to the weight, as I have found by experiments on pendulums, very accurately made.” [Motte’s 1728 translation, Book I, p. 73]
The mainstream view that F is the "net force," which of course includes frictional forces and gravity, and they also acknowledge that Relativity would mean Newton's laws need to be rewritten, so I'm not sure how most of your critiques apply to the mainstream view on this one.
Force cannot equal mass x acceleration as outlined by Newton. Friction and gravity are absent. So the equation is wrong. Gravity is a weak force in any event and has its own set of problems never rectified by either Newton or Einstotle.
Thanks Gemma for the kind words. The 'science' shrouds all of this in mystery, but in reality, it is not difficult for a lay person to comprehend if the priests of 'the science' talked clearly and transparently. What scares people are the contrived maths but these can and should be broken down into their simple components and properly explicated. Bit of a confidence trick all of it. The issue is the lack of simple experiments in real life which are then described using straight forward calculations not based on axioms or 'laws'.
Unlike Einstein, Newton wasn’t guessing; he was measuring.
Your experiment didn’t disprove F = ma; it simply failed to test it properly. Rather than refuting Newton, it revealed a misunderstanding of what he clearly stated: a steady net force on a constant mass yields a steady change in motion; a principle he verified experimentally, not merely assumed.
You also imply Newton didn’t conduct experiments. Yet, as Chittenden wrote in his Life of Sir Isaac Newton (1846), “[of] all the books [Newton] ever wrote, there was one of colours and light, established upon thousands of experiments which he had been twenty years of making, and which had cost him many hundreds of pounds.”
And that was only his work on optics. If £200 then could buy a modest house, how do your backyard trials compare?
Had you so much as opened the Principia, you’d have seen that the distinction between mass and weight is literally on page one, where Definition I states:
“The quantity of matter is the measure of the same, arising from its density and bulk conjunctly… It is this quantity that I mean hereafter everywhere under the name of body or mass. And the same is known by the weight of each body; for it is proportional to the weight, as I have found by experiments on pendulums, very accurately made.” [Motte’s 1728 translation, Book I, p. 73]
The mainstream view that F is the "net force," which of course includes frictional forces and gravity, and they also acknowledge that Relativity would mean Newton's laws need to be rewritten, so I'm not sure how most of your critiques apply to the mainstream view on this one.
Force cannot equal mass x acceleration as outlined by Newton. Friction and gravity are absent. So the equation is wrong. Gravity is a weak force in any event and has its own set of problems never rectified by either Newton or Einstotle.
What a wonderful article on Newton’s Second ‘Law’ of motion which even this English major was readily able to follow.
Thank you.
Thanks Gemma for the kind words. The 'science' shrouds all of this in mystery, but in reality, it is not difficult for a lay person to comprehend if the priests of 'the science' talked clearly and transparently. What scares people are the contrived maths but these can and should be broken down into their simple components and properly explicated. Bit of a confidence trick all of it. The issue is the lack of simple experiments in real life which are then described using straight forward calculations not based on axioms or 'laws'.