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Talk:Essay:Quantifying Openmindedness (view source)
Revision as of 14:00, February 15, 2009
, 14:00, February 15, 2009→The gravity question
::::: Your comment misses the point. The phrase "Newtonian gravity" illustrates that we're talking about the law of gravity as being in rough proportion to one over distance squared. If you insist that it must be ''precisely'' r-squared, as you seem to, then your mind is inexplicably closed. Open it, and your only regret will be that you didn't open it sooner.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 08:48, 15 February 2009 (EST)
::::: Your comment misses the point. The phrase "Newtonian gravity" illustrates that we're talking about the law of gravity as being in rough proportion to one over distance squared. If you insist that it must be ''precisely'' r-squared, as you seem to, then your mind is inexplicably closed. Open it, and your only regret will be that you didn't open it sooner.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 08:48, 15 February 2009 (EST)
:::::No Andy, you're the only one missing anything here. The phrase "Newtonian gravity" means something very specific, which is a theoretical framework which leads directly to the consequence that force is inversely proportional to distance squared. Newton didn't just randomly pick 2 as the power because he felt like it; it is an immediate consequence of developing a classical field theory in a 3D space. By definition, if you had a law of gravity that isn't inverse-square (and you will note that I never claimed such a thing was impossible) then it isn't Newtonian gravity. [[User:BrianW|BrianW]] 09:00, 15 February 2009 (EST)