Rotation

[Ludwik Kowalski <kowalskiL@MAIL.MONTCLAIR.EDU>]

Under a different thread Muhsin Ogretme asked:

> I remembered another question (a famous one) "why does the earth
> rotate?". The common answer is because there is no agent to stop it.
> Can we start with the idea that all heavenly objects were already
> rotating when they started their lifes? Is it a good idea to accept the
> rotationof the heavenly objects as an internal property of them - as
> we take the concept of inertia as an internal property of mass?

The law of conservation of angular momentum (for a perfectly
isolated star or planet) is like Newton's first law. Both are like
axioms in mathematics, except they were derived on the basis of
studying natural phenomena. These are very useful idealizations.
Ludwik Kowalski