„"[…]that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it."“
Isaac NewtonIsaac Newton warns against the absurdity of action at a distance without a medium. A central quote for reflection on forces and physics.
Isaac Newton was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and alchemist, widely recognized as one of the most influential scientists of all time.
Isaac Newton (In a letter to Dr. Bentley dated February 25, 1692)- Newton questions the idea of action at a distance without a medium – a critical reflection that challenges the foundations of modern physical theories.
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Isaac Newton (1643–1727) was an English scientist who made fundamental contributions to physics and mathematics. He founded classical mechanics with his laws of motion and discovered the law of gravitation. Newton was also a significant astronomer and theologian.
Copyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork"It may be boldly asked where can the man be found, possessing the extraordinary gifts of Newton, who could suffer himself to be deluded by such a hocus-pocus, if he had not in the first instance willfully deceived himself? Only those who know the strength of self-deception, and the extent to which it sometimes trenches on dishonesty, are in a condition to explain the conduct of Newton and of Newton’s school. To support his unnatural theory Newton heaps fiction upon fiction, seeking to dazzle where he cannot convince. In whatever way or manner may have occurred this business, I must still say that I curse this modern theory of Cosmogony, and hope that perchance there may appear, in due time, some young scientist of genius, who will pick up courage enough to upset this universally disseminated delirium of lunatics."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Copyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork"You wonder that there are so few followers of the Pythagorean opinion [that the earth moves] while I am astonished that there have been any up to this day who have embraced and followed it.
Nor can I ever sufficiently admire the outstanding acumen of those who have taken hold of this opinion and accepted it as true:
they have, through sheer force of intellect, done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what reason told them over that which sensible experience plainly showed them to be the contrary.
For the arguments against the whirling [the rotation] of the earth we have already examined are very plausible, as we have seen; and the fact that the Ptolemaics and the Aristotelians and all their disciples took them to be conclusive is indeed a strong argument of their effectiveness.
But the experiences which overtly contradict the annual movement [the movement of the earth around the sun] are indeed so much greater in their apparent force that, I repeat, there is no limit to my astonishment when I reflect that Aristarchus and Copernicus were able to make reason so conquer sense that in defiance of the latter, the former became mistress of their belief."
Salviati
Copyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork"For what I want to say here, knowledge of the book's content is not necessarily required, because it concerns easily understandable facts about the cause and nature of gravitation—the force that presses everything to the ground and is not easily harnessed permanently for propulsion purposes, the force that keeps all celestial bodies in their orbits and holds our entire universe together. How gravitation achieves the feat of creating the conditions for our earthly life remains unexplained by science to this day. Science only offers a series of competing model concepts here. Even the nature of gravitation is largely unknown to it. As Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) said at the time: "I have explained the celestial phenomena and the tides based on gravity, but I have not been able to derive the cause of the properties of gravity from the phenomena so far." Nothing has changed since then. One who must know because he struggled daily with the problem of overcoming it, the former deputy chief engineer of the Rolls-Royce aircraft engine works, A. V. Cleaver, summed it up as follows, I quote literally: "Gravity is truly a highly mysterious and elusive phenomenon. It seems questionable whether many people, even technically trained ones, realize how justified this claim is or whether they notice the conspiracy of silence with which gravity is treated in most physics textbooks. It is almost reminiscent of a Polynesian taboo or the Victorian attitude towards certain topics such as sex or particular organs and functions, which were deemed somewhat improper. The student learns that all bodies attract each other, that the stability of the universe is determined thereby, and the equations of Newton's laws describe their effects. Yet—unless he is a specialized graduate student of pure physics—he is still expected to accept the old idea of “action at a distance,” and it is quite unlikely that any of his teachers will draw his attention to our complete ignorance of the physical relationships between gravity and other phenomena, simply because we know nothing about it and because the academic world apparently prefers not to broadcast this fact!""
Otto Jung
Copyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork"I confess that I cannot imagine how any human being, in his proper senses, can believe that the Sun is stationary when, with his own eyes, he sees it revolving around the heavens, nor how he can believe that the Earth, on which he stands, is whirling with the speed of lightning around the Sun, when he feels not the slightest motion."
David Wardlow Scott
Copyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork"Gentlemen, as a physicist who has dedicated his entire life to the sober pursuit of science, to the exploration of matter, I am certainly free from the suspicion of being taken for an idle dreamer.
And so, after my investigations into the atom, I declare this: There is no such thing as matter in itself.
All matter comes into being and persists only through a force—a force that sets the particles of the atom into vibration and binds them together as the minutest solar system of the cosmos. Yet, since neither an intelligent nor an eternal force exists within the vast expanse of the universe—for humanity has failed to devise the long-sought perpetuum mobile—we must posit behind this force a conscious, intelligent spirit. This spirit is the primal source of all matter. It is not the visible, transient matter that constitutes the real, the true, the actual—for without the spirit, matter would not exist at all—but rather the invisible, immortal spirit that is the ultimate truth! Yet, since spirit alone cannot exist either, and every spirit belongs to a being, we are compelled to assume the existence of spiritual beings. And since these beings cannot arise from themselves but must be created, I do not shy away from naming this mysterious creator as all civilized peoples of the earth have called Him in earlier millennia: God! Thus, the physicist, tasked with the study of matter, steps from the realm of the material into the realm of the spirit. And with that, our work concludes, and we must entrust our inquiry to the hands of philosophy."
Max Planck
Copyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork"To fanciful minds and theoretical speculators, the so-called "science" of modern astronomy furnishes a field, unsurpassed in any science for the unrestrained license of the imagination, and the building up of a complicated conjuration of absurdities such as to overawe the simpleton and make him gape with wonder"
Thomas Winship
Copyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
Copyright © yoice.net – Quote Artwork
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