Newton & the absolute, true, mathematical quantities themselves (materialism)

[ish mailian]

Science's Sacred Cows (Part 2): Absolute Space and Time

Science remains most true to itself and of greatest value to humanity
when it assiduously avoids unnecessary assumptions. Over the long arc
of history, science has initially embraced -- then discarded -- most
of the following tacit assumptions: dualism, determinism,
reductionism, absolute time, absolute space, the principle of
locality, materialism, and most recently, realism. In subsequent
posts, we'll examine each ...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-pruett/newtons-laws_b_2431074.html

On Sat, Feb 13, 2016 at 6:35 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> A “Scholium” at the beginning of the Principia, inserted between the
> “Definitions” and the “Laws of Motion”, lays out Newton's views on
> time, space, place, and motion. He begins by saying that, since in
> common life these quantities are conceived of in terms of their
> relations to sensible bodies, it is incumbent to distinguish between,
> on the one hand, the relative, apparent, common conception of them,
> and, on the other, the absolute, true, mathematical quantities
> themselves. To paraphrase:
>
> Absolute, true, and mathematical time, from its own nature, passes
> equably without relation to anything external, and thus without
> reference to any change or way of measuring of time (e.g., the hour,
> day, month, or year).
> Absolute, true, and mathematical space remains similar and immovable
> without relation to anything external. (The specific meaning of this
> will become clearer below from the way it contrasts with Descartes'
> concept of space.) Relative spaces are measures of absolute space
> defined with reference to some system of bodies or another, and thus a
> relative space may, and likely will, be in motion.
> The place of a body is the space which it occupies, and may be
> absolute or relative according to whether the space is absolute or
> relative.
> Absolute motion is the translation of a body from one absolute place
> to another; relative motion the translation from one relative place to
> another.
>
> Newton devotes the bulk of the Scholium to arguing that the
> distinction between the true quantities and their relative measures is
> necessary and justified.
>
> It is evident from these characterizations that, according to Newton:
>
> space is something distinct from body and exists independently of the
> existence of bodies,
> there is a fact of the matter whether a given body moves and what its
> true quantity of motion is, and
> the true motion of a body does not consist of, or cannot be defined in
> terms of, its motion relative to other bodies.
>
> The first of these theses was a point of major contention in
> 17th-century natural philosophy and one assailed by Newton's critics
> such as Leibniz, Huygens, and Berkeley. The second was not in general
> dispute. Descartes, Leibniz, and Berkeley all believed that, to put it
> in somewhat scholastic terms, the predicate ‘x is in true motion’ is a
> complete predicate in the sense that it holds or fails to hold for any
> given body. (Huygens, at least in his post-Principia views,
> constitutes a special case.) Thus, for those who denied the first
> thesis, it was necessary to secure a definition, or an analysis, of
> what it means for a body be in true motion (and what determines the
> quantity of that motion), so as to be as adequate to the facts as
> Newton's characterization of true motion. The figures mentioned above
> all deemed that motion relative to other bodies is a necessary
> condition for true motion, although not, by itself, a sufficient
> condition.
>
> Over the course of years, the consensus in the 17th and early 18th Centuries....
>
> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/newton-stm/
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