On 11/02/2008, Grant Edwards <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 2008-02-11, Steve Holden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Well the history of physics for at least two hundred years has > > been a migration away from the intuitive. > > Starting at least as far back as Newtonian mechanics. I once > read a very interesting article about some experiments that > showed that even simple newtonian physics is counter-intuitive. > Two of the experiments I remember vividly. One of them showed > that the human brain expects objects constrained to travel in a > curved path will continue to travel in a curved path when > released. The other showed that the human brain expects that > when an object is dropped it will land on a spot immediately > below the drop point -- regardless of whether or not the ojbect > was in motion horizontally when released. > > After repeated attempts at the tasks set for them in the > experiments, the subjects would learn strategies that would > work in a Newtonian world, but the initial intuitive reactions > were very non-Newtonian (regardless of how educated they were > in physics). >
I would like to take part in such an experiment. I should note that movies and such often portray the wrong motion of objects. Years of that type of conditioning may be responsible for the non-newtonian expectations of the participants. Dotan Cohen http://what-is-what.com http://gibberish.co.il א-ב-ג-ד-ה-ו-ז-ח-ט-י-ך-כ-ל-ם-מ-ן-נ-ס-ע-ף-פ-ץ-צ-ק-ר-ש-ת A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list