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.]
Just so. Einstein didn't prove Newton wrong; he proved that Newton's laws were right for the limited subset of conditions Newton was aware of.
By way of an analogy, imagine an underwater civilization of intelligent aliens. They make measurements and observations about the world around them, and Sir Isaac Brightfin codifies those observations into a very simple law that predicts how fast a stone falls.
Sir Brightfin's observations aren't taken on faith; they're matters of empirical fact. People go out and see stones falling and they agree with Sir Brightfin's descriptions.
Then, a little later, Albert Sharptail comes up with a new set of equations. They're more complicated than Sir Isaac Brightfin's equations, because Sir Isaac Brightfin's equations have the viscosity of water built into them. Albert Sharptail's equations, though, let you plug in different kinds of numbers, for different liquids or even for air, and predict how fast a stone will fall in all those environments.
Now, if you plug in water's viscosity to Albert Sharptail's equations, they agree exactly with Sir Isaac Brightfin's equations.
Albert Sharptail's equations have not proven Isaac Brightfin's equations wrong; far from it. They have abstracted Isaac Brightfin's equations, made them more general so that they apply to a larger set of environments. Only an anchovy would think that Albert Sharptail "proved Isaac Brightfin wrong"!
Originally Posted By: "hal itosis"
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.
It's not unproven; in fact, it's been demonstrated very well, for things traveling a lot slower than light. Time dilation is an inconvenient fact of life for the engineers who design the GPS satellites, because time for them passes differently than time on the ground, and if they don't account for that then your GPS system wouldn't work.
That's one of the neat things about science. You don't take anything on faith. You don't believe Newton because he's smart and you venerate him. You believe only those things which Newton said which you can confirm with evidence; you discard things Newton said which don't conform to the evidence.
Originally Posted By: "Hal Itosis"
Newton got a few key things wrong... yet science had faith in his version of the truth. Accept it.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Newton said many things, none of which were taken on faith, and all of which were only believed insofar as they could be proven by evidence. When environments and situations were found where they did not match the evidence, they were superseded by more general ideas that did match the evidence, and also still matched the evidence in those places where Newton's ideas did. No faith involved.
Faith is belief without evidence. Nobody has faith in science--or, if someone does have faith in science, he's doing it wrong.
