We've Been Misreading a Major Law of Physics For Almost 300 Years
We've Been Misreading a Major Law of Physics For Almost 300 Years
When Isaac Newton inscribed onto parchment his now-famed laws of motion in 1687, he could have only hoped we'd be discussing them three centuries later.
Original version:
Every body persists in its state of being at rest or moving uniformly straight forward, unless it is compelled to change its state by force impressed.
Corrected translation:
Every body persists in its state of being at rest or moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed.
There's no change in meaning.
'Except insofar' is a perfect synonym of 'unless'.
Revisiting the archives, Hoek realized this common paraphrasing featured a misinterpretation that flew under the radar until 1999, when two scholars picked up on the translation of one Latin word that had been overlooked: quatenus, which means "insofar", not unless.
To Hoek, this makes all the difference. Rather than describing how an object maintains its momentum if no forces are impressed on it, Hoek says the new reading shows Newton meant that every change in a body's momentum – every jolt, dip, swerve, and spurt – is due to external forces.
Right, no doubt to a philosopher this makes all the difference, but we haven't been reading it wrong. Words are transient and the result is exactly the same as Newton's first law, but with more words. Sounds like an academic in need of a grant sensationalizing old stuff
You got it man, this is just a fart in a bathtub
Nothing has changed
BRB, off to write a self help book
Revisiting the archives, Hoek realized this common paraphrasing featured a misinterpretation that flew under the radar until 1999, when two scholars picked up on the translation of one Latin word that had been overlooked: quatenus, which means "insofar", not unless.
To Hoek, this makes all the difference. Rather than describing how an object maintains its momentum if no forces are impressed on it, Hoek says the new reading shows Newton meant that every change in a body's momentum – every jolt, dip, swerve, and spurt – is due to external forces.
Newton's classical observations have stood up well.
If anything, it's quantum that has been poorly treated by generations of explaining-away. The world of the tiny must be predicted with probabilities because there is no way for us to observe it directly. It's not rolling dice ... we -have- to.
While trying out models of what it's doing boggles our minds, our limitations mean we cannot decide whether it's really deterministic. Reality isn't limited that way. (Einstein was right.)
Some astronomers recently took a clever look for whether space is quantized into a 'froth'. They studied monochrome light from stars 18 billion light years away, at redshift z=2.34. They found evidence of quantization into froth in all that time. https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.06016