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Re FBD



The following is a quotation from "Mechanics" by William Fogg Osgood
written in 1937
and still available from Dover Press. It is a delightful book, written with
great humor.
This selection comes at the end of a discussion of a free body diagram
applied to a
particle in a circular orbit tied by a string to a peg.

...And now, after all is said and done, comes the rejoinder: "But the
particle did pull
on the string, for otherwise the string would not have pulled on the peg."
There is no
answer to these people. Some of them are good citizens. They vote the
ticket of the
party that is responsible for the prosperity of the country; they belong to
the only
true church; they subscribe to the Red Cross drive -- but they have no
place in the
Temple of Science; they profane it.