Abstract
The present comment on Solari and Natiello’s paper (Found. Sci. 2019) values their constructivist approach to Newtonian Mechanics. My critical point concerns only the link between the concept of force and phenomena. It will be shown that the idealised form of the law of inertia created by the authors avoids criticism of the law and that this law (idealised or not) leads to the concept of force as the cause of acceleration. This concept appears in the authors’ reconstruction as an assumption. They add that this assumption must be contrasted with experiments. Following this, I address an experiment, in which the force that is taken as the cause of acceleration, is not present in the phenomenon at stake. As it thus does not satisfy the property of locality, which any cause has to, force cannot be a cause.
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Notes
Planck (1916), Lenard (1936), Sommerfeld (1947), Budó (1974), Hestenes (1987), Alonso and Finn (1992), Knudsen and Hjorth (1996), Young and Freedman (2004), Nolting (2005), Gerthsen (2006), Kuypers (2012), among others. Philosphers of science have also understood force as the cause of acceleration (Cartwright 1983; Wilson 2009a, b; Massin 2017).
Jammer’s historical book on force provides an overview about the criticism of concept. Among contemporary physicists, we find Hamel 1912, Ludwig 1985 and Wilczek 2004. Philosophers of science have also defended that force does not exist (Russell 1937; Nagel 1961; Ellis 1976; Bigelow et al. 1988; Hicks and Schaffer 2017).
The criticism of the law of inertia began with Neumann (1870). Some critical remarks can be found earlier (Jacobi 1996; Riemann 1876). Neumann’s proposal to solve the law of inertia problem was criticized by Mach (1872) and gave rise to the idea of an inertial reference frame (Lange 1885). Lange (1902) reported on the discussion on the law in his paper.
‘It must be recognized that we cannot ‘‘prove’’ the principle of inertia by an experimental test, because we can never be sure that the object under test is truly free of all external interactions, such as those due to extremely massive objects at very large distances.’ (French 1971, p. 164) We find the same claim by Planck (1916), Nielsen (1935), Becker (1954), Hanson (1963), Bergmann and Schaefer (1998), Scobel et al. (2002) and Stachel (2005).
Norton 2003, p. 17.
Halliday et al. 1993, p. 117.
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Lopes Coelho, R. A Comment on Solari and Natiello’s Constructivist View of Newton’s Mechanics. Found Sci 25, 703–710 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09651-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09651-7