Thats the seed of how this conversation got side-tracked into issues of faith; science doesn't place its 'faith' in anything, and understanding the difference between science and faith is key to even being able to talk about things like unexplained scientific principles.
<snip>
Einstein did not prove that Newton's laws are false. In fact, Newton's laws can not be false; if you use Newton's laws to calculate the path of a baseball or a satellite, and then you throw the baseball or launch the satellite, you'll see that Newton's laws are spot-on.
What Einstein did was show that Newton's laws apply only in certain circumstances; and created new, more complex laws that apply to more circumstances. But if you use relativity to calculate the path of a baseball--a silly thing to do, because it would be beastly complicated and difficult--but if you do it, you'll see that it arrives at the same answer Newton does.
Which it has to, because you can go out and throw the baseball and see that it's the correct answer.
The closer and closer to lightspeed that baseball approaches, the more and more Newton (and you) get wronger and wronger results. That's one thing Einstein solved, and Newton would never have expected his equations to err (simply due to the object's high velocity).
The missing factor is something like (1 - v^2/c^2)^1/2 [causing weirdness like mass and time to change.]
Plus... Newton believed that time was a fixed, never-varying quantity. If anyone ever told Newton that on the event horizon of a black hole time actually stops... he probably would have passed out (or passed something). 3-dimensional space is actually a curved 4-dimensional continuum? Forget it. Newton's concept of "time" was that it behaved like a perfectly constantly accurate clock, always ticking at the same "rate", for all observers... everywhere in the universe, regardless of motion or gravity. [some readers may recall i already mentioned words to that effect back on page 6.]
I seem to recall some example where we start with 2 twins and send one off in a spacecraft traveling at near lightspeed for 20 years. When he returns to Earth his twin there has aged 20 years, but the astronaut twin is much less older... something like that? Of course that's unproven as yet... but (assuming it's possible), Newton would never have expected that.
Newton got a few key things wrong... yet science had faith in his version of the truth. Accept it.
[i'm not saying he wasn't a genius -- he was. He did more great things than millions combined. Fine.]
Last edited by Hal Itosis; 10/15/0912:46 PM. Reason: not enough (good) words
