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I’m sure this person thinks they’re being clever, but you know what, let’s do this: Newton WAS wrong. A thread on perspective, bias, and how our particular circumstance impacts our thinking. 1/x
I’ll start with the laws of motion. When Newton wrote these up, he was observing momentum. The concept of "energy" as we understand it today did not exist 2/x
One hundred years later, Émilie du Châtelet, dropped heavy balls onto soft clay from different heights and realized that Newton’s calculations were wrong. The force of impact depended something other than momentum. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mil… 3/x
She proposed a new quantity, energy, which incorporated both the height of the fall (potential energy) and the speed of the object (kinetic energy). Émilie du Châtelet defined energy and corrected Newton's work. cosmosmagazine.com/mathematics/em…
Newton was wrong. His error was identified by a woman. And when she later translated his treatise on physics into French, she went ahead and wrote her own understanding of energy into it - because she was right and her work made his theory more complete. 5/x
Émilie du Châtelet’s law of the conservation of energy was not only essential to accurately predicting physical phenomena on earth, it is also the foundation of the first law of thermodynamics. 6/x en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservat…
Aspiring scientists, I can’t stress this enough. Say it. Write it down. Argue with the knowledge that is held as cannon. Your ideas are just as valid for discussion, just as useful a contribution. And sometimes, you hold the piece that’s missing. Be like Emilie. 7/x
(Seriously! She wrote a book with Voltaire! She was an excellent mathematician! She spoke 6 languages! Let’s not forget her! aps.org/publications/a…) 8/x
On to the other big important way that Newton was wrong! Newton believed that gravity was a function of ‘aether’, a substance that connected everything in the universe. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminifer… 9/x
In this universe the aether was thought to transmit gravity instantaneously, and gravitational forces were constant. This was a universe full to the brim, with no vacuums, no abyss. 10/x
Here’s where perspective and bias comes into play. Newton lived on Earth. On Earth, gravity was indeed constant. At least, the variations in gravity here on Earth were almost impossible to measure with the equipment available at the time. 11/x
From Newton’s perspective, a constant gravitational force throughout the universe was totally reasonable - because he thought the place he was represented the entire universe. 12/x
Let’s face it, in Newton’s era of divine order the earth *was* the entire universe. (Coincidentally folks, biology was also founded in this age of reading the will of God in the natural world, and wow has that left us with some legacy issues around hierarchy and determinism)
Newton made the observations that he could make, from the perspective he had. He was an Earthling on Earth, who thought, complacently but understandably, that his experience represented the reality of the universe. However, he was wrong. 14/x
For one, aether wasn't particularly supported by experimentation or calculations. For example, the constant speed of light integral to Maxwell's electromagnetic theory was hard to reconcile with the aether of Newtonian physics en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminifer…
And, no one had ever been able to measure aether, even though it was supposed to underpin the universe. While absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, there was a LOT of absence of evidence. popularmechanics.com/science/energy…
What are you going to do, contradict two thousand years of theory going back to Aristotle?
Yes. Yes, that is exactly what we’re going to do. I hope all of you amazing scientists out there fighting impostor syndrome look at that theory that doesn’t make sense and say “I reject it, that is not how I see the world.” Be like Einstein. 18/x
Because Einstein was another Earthling, but his work asked questions from a different perspective and suggested that maybe what we needed to do was de-center our earthbound experiences and consider what motion looked like from a universal perspective. 19/x
(Since we’re on the subject, there’s some debate as to whether Einstein stole this work from the physics student who became his wife. Misogyny is bad for many reasons and also because it makes women in science invisible) technologyreview.com/s/427621/did-e…
Einstein puts forth his theory of General Relativity in 1916 and argues about it for two years because this theory *cannot be tested on Earth.* The only way to test this theory is to look at starlight and see if it bends around celestial objects. 21/x
Sir Dyson realizes there is an eclipse in 1919 that will place the brilliant Hyades star cluster between the Sun and the Earth during a solar eclipse. Here is the opportunity to remove ourselves from our earthbound framework and test a new understanding of the universe. 22/x
He deploys Sir Eddington to two locations to measure the light coming from these stars. The starlight bends around the sun. 14 years after Special Relativity, 3 years after General Relativity, Einstein’s theory passes its first chance to be disproven. nature.com/articles/d4158…
Aether doesn’t exist. The universe is a vacuum. Gravity is a result of a curved space-time that Newton could not concieve of. Newton's physics is a special particular case.
It is not universal. Newton, is wrong. (Again). 24/x
It is not universal. Newton, is wrong. (Again). 24/x
People resisted. They LIKED aether. It was where the spirits of the departed lived. It was what connected them to the rest of the universe. British scientists in particular devoted a lot time to to defending aether link.springer.com/chapter/10.100… 25/x
But they were wrong too. When Einstein stepped outside Newton's earthbound frame of reference, our knowledge of the universe became more complete. In having the confidence to challenge a frame of reference we improve our understanding. 26/x
When I say that #evopsych is a sham of a science I mean that it refuses to interrogate its frame of reference. It does not consider that perhaps the questions it finds so interesting are born out of a poor understanding of the universe. 27/x
Evopsych irritates me in particular because its investigations cast racist, sexist, anti-semitic social structures as inescapable and routine. A peer-reviewed shrug, saying that’s just how it is. 28/x
But Biology is not destiny, it never has been. It is the beginning, not the end of our story
So yeah, Newton was wrong. He was bound by his limited experience and unwilling or unable to look beyond it. His contributions, while a starting point, are not infalliable. Nor do they excuse misogyny. "Nerd tunnel vision" leaves science worse off: theverge.com/2019/9/19/2087…
One last note - Physics has had 400 years to hash out its bad theories. We’re now at a place where the amazing @CarloRovelli writes wonders like Reality is Not What It Seems. Biology started this process in 1950. We've already experienced huge upheavals. I expect many more //
