I have rather pleasantly been sitting this one out for a while, but can't
resist: A. Marlow and I were in to this over a year ago; when I was playing
David Bowman's role (rather more ineptly I might add).
In order to try to shift this discussion to a more fruitful level I am going
to give A Marlow and David Bowman and any others interested in this the
following HW assignment.
Get a copy of the following American Journal of Physics article
"On the Classical Laws of Motion", L. Eisenbud, AJP, vol. 26, pg 144 (1958).
I would very much like to hear their opinions of this article; as I have
learned to respect both of your opinions writings over the last couple of
years that I've participated in Phys-L. The article concerns itself
squarely with the issues being discussed; which I will humbly rephrase as
"does the presence of an acceleration, in some frame of reference, of an
object indicate the presence of a force?".
To wet their's and other's apetite to actually spend the time to read the
article I will quote from it and add a comment or two.
"It is not true, however, that the Newtonian formulation of the laws of
motion has entirely escaped criticism. To counterbalance the assurances of
Thomson and Tait, we may quote from Hertz's Introduction to his 'Principles
of Mechanics' (1894), 'It is exceedingly difficult to expound to thoughtful
hearers the very introduction to mechanics without being occasionally
embarrassed, without feeling tempted now and again to apologize, without
wishing to get as quickly as possible over the rudiments and on to examples
which speak for themselves. I fancy that Newton himself must have felt this
embarrassment.' Newton's laws were criticized by anumber of physicists,
philosophers, and mathematicians; perhaps the most important contributions
to this discussion were made by Kirchoff, Mach, Hertz, Clifford, and
Poincare."
He then references various writings of the above folks.
I found this article during that previous incarnation of this discussion and
looked up all references in Science Citation's from 1958 to 1996. I was
able to find every article, listed in Science Citations's that referenced
this article(except in one Polish Journal). Interestingly enough, not one
offered a critical opinion of the article.
Joel Rauber
PS
I really hope some of you will read this and comment and discuss it. It is
very germane to the topic and the discussions on Phys-L I imagine to have
quite properly prepared our minds for its reading.