Subject: Re: Sciences and their founders Date: Wed, 22 Mar 95 14:40:58 +0000 From: wpc-AT-cs.strath.ac.uk Philip ------- Paul then proceeds to show that aspects of Gallileo's and Newton's theories are retained and supported by modern relativity theory. What's more, Paul says that everyone still uses Newtonian theory for practical calculations. I find Paul's account, despite its wonderful citations of historians, utterly ahistorical. One would wonder why physicists ever develop new theories if the old ones are just as good as the new ones. Paul ----- The citations that I have been giving are all from leading physicists not historians Weinberg is at the department of physics at Texas Hawkings is the Laucasian Professor of Maths at Cambridge and thus is the present occupant of Newtons Chair at that university. Their views may be fairly taken as representative of modern views in physics. The reason why physicists develop new theories is either to account for observations of domains that were previously inaccessible or to attempt to generalise several previous theories under a new and more encompassing one. This is not a matter of getting rid of an old theory, but seeing that it is in fact a special case of a more general one. Philip ------ One would wonder why physicists ever develop new theories if the old ones are just as good as the new ones. If I remember right, there were problems with wave motion that Newton's theory couldn't explain and that Einstein's theory could. Paul ---- It depends upon what you mean by wave motion. If you are refering to Einsteins paper on the photo-electric effect, this is was addressed to difficulties in the spectrum of black body radiation when one tried to explain it using Maxwell's theory of electromagnetic radiation. This had very little to do with Newton, and it is arguable that Einsteins response - that electromagnetic energy was quantised, reflects a return, albeit in more sophisticated form, to the Newtonian corpuscular-undulatory theory. --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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