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At 09:41 AM 8/30/01 -0400, Hugh Haskell wrote:
"There is no reason to expect that an object will have any one particularI would say that this would be true only if one has definitions of
acceleration given a certain force. When the acceleration of the object is
measured, however, we find that it obeys a law of the form a = F/m."
both force and mass that do not involve acceleration in any way.
I don't think any exist.
In fact, we use the above relationship to identify forces.
Then at 10:51 AM 8/30/01 -0400, I disagreed.
Here is a shorter and perhaps clearer way of making my point. Suppose we
did use F = ma to define and "identify" forces. Then F=ma would be a
tautology. There would be absolutely no way, by definition, to find a
force that did not uphold the F=ma law.
But that is not the case. We _can_ define (F) and (m) and (a) in such a
way that it is possible to design experiments to test the F=ma law. For
homework: design a series of experiments to do this.
As Karl Popper explained, a theory (such as F=ma) that is falsifiable is
incomparably more important than one that isn't.