REM@SU-AI@sri-unix.UUCP (09/02/83)
From: Robert Maas <REM@SU-AI> Editor of the Times-Tribune: I was greatly dismayed to see the shoddy journalism in the AP story you published on September 1 on page A-3. You and AP seem to be conspiring to confuse the public about how the simple laws of motion discovered and formulated by Isaac Newton work. You say "To move an object in outer space takes force sufficient to overcome the inertia. And once the object is moving, it takes force equal to the inertia, plus the velocity of the movement, to bring it to rest." This is uneducated mindrot which has virtually nothing to do with the correct formulation of Newton's laws of motion. First, you seem to be saying there's a particular amount of force needed to overcome the inertia of an object. You're wrong, any amount of force no matter how small will start an object moving. The more force you use the more rapidly it will gain speed, and the longer you continue to apply a given force the faster speed it will reach. But there's no such thing as "force sufficient to overcome the inertia". Then you claim the force to stop is equal to the inertia plus the velocity. This is definitely nonsense since neither inertia nor velocity is in the same units as force, and neither can be equated to force. It also implies the force to stop is greater than the force to stop. This is false, the force to stop is the same as the force to start, if both are applied for the same time. To stop you have to exactly do the opposite of what you did when you started, apply the same force for the same time, or half the force for twice the time, or twice the force for half the time, etc. In the next paragraph you say that Newton passed that law about inertia. What has the writer been smoking lately? Doesn't the writer know the difference in usage of the word "law" between legal statutes which are passed by some legal group such as Congress, and formulations of how nature behaves which are merely observations of how things already are? Newton didn't "pass" the laws of planetary motion! He formulated them to explain the way things are. Finally you show disrespect for Newton when you refer to "that law, and some others Newton dreamed up". Those formulations of natural action were NOT dreamed up, they were carefully thought out. You sound like you think Newton made up these laws just to make more work for people, and then forced them on the rest of us, the way some lawmakers pass complicated income tax regulations that only lawyers can understand. Actually Newton's laws of motion unified and simplified our ways of predicting the behaviour of objects in motion, replacing ideas like gods carrying planets in chariots (or planets attached to gigantic glass spheres), and objects trying to get to their natural place. Even so, none of his laws were forced on us, we had the choice of which formulations to use, and we found that Newton's laws were much more accurate than anything before so we took to using them for our calculations of motion. Instead of publishing that totally wrong and confusing stuff, you would have done better not to publish anything at all. Next time how about asking somebody who has had a course in high-school physics to proofread this kind of article before you publish it?