On 07.05.2012 22:19 meekerdb said the following:
On 5/7/2012 12:29 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
On 07.05.2012 20:11 meekerdb said the following:
On 5/7/2012 10:42 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
On 07.05.2012 04:17 meekerdb said the following:
On 5/6/2012 5:47 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On May 6, 4:06 pm, meekerdb<meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
Newton, Boyle, Tyndall, Descarte, Laplace,
Kepler,...none of them were from the universities, which were
dominated by theology.
All of them were still theological thinkers though,
Theological in that the concerned themselves with fundamentals and god
(although Laplace famously said he had no need of that hypothesis),
but
all unconventional. Descarte was on the index of prohibited books
until
the index was abandoned in 1962. Newton was an Aryan heretic.
The statement of Laplace is a part of the story when Newton called in
God to preserve the stability of the Sun system. Two quotes from
Feyerabend
“Laplace showed a century later, that the planetary system did not fall
apart but oscillated with a very large period. ‘I do not need this
hypothesis’, he said, when Napoleon asked him about the need for a
divine being.”
Napoleon was not asking about the stability of the solar system. He had
not even read Laplace's book.
“But this was not yet the end of matter. … A precise calculation would
have given infinities. … But this meant that Newton’s theory gave
correct results only when used in an ad hoc way.”
Where has Feyerbrand written this? Is he claiming that the solar system
cannot be stable within Newton's theory? Does he think GR is needed
(NASA doesn't)?
This is a quote from Tyranny of Science
http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/04/god-as-a-cosmic-operator.html
He is really saying that using Laplaces method of series, taking the
limit of the series would have given infinities. He recognizes that
Poincare showed how the solar system is stable within Newtonian physics.
So it is not the case "that Newton's theory gave correct results only
when used in an ad hoc way."
It is exactly the case that at the time of Newton and Laplace, Newtonian
physics was used in an ad hoc way. We should consider event in the
historical perspective, otherwise it does not make sense to discuss the
development of science.
Evgenii
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