An Examination Of The Newtonian Method - 1116 Words

Connor McCourt Mr. Fisher Junior Mathematics November 15, 2015 An Examination of The Newtonian Method The aim of Isaac Newton’s Principia is explicitly stated in his preface to the reader: His desire is to reestablish natural philosophy; to show how philosophers can employ various mathematical and experimental methods to phenomena in order to reach conclusions about nature, particularly about the motions of solid bodies. Through the utilization of geometry to describe celestial firmament, he wishes to accurately demonstrate mechanics with a direction guided by the foundations of geometry. In his analysis, the purpose of geometry is to teach the solutions of practical mechanics upon mechanical procedures, thus he constitutes†¦show more content†¦This preliminary framework expresses that forces are proportional to mass and to acceleration. Since mass—or the quantity of matter—and acceleration are both quantities that can be measured, it seems Newton gives the reader a means of measuring the forces that are to governed the natural world. If one begins to tr eat forces as measurable quantities, then one can endeavor to identify two ostensibly discordant forces as a single, compounded force through thinking of them as measurements. It is this move by Newton that appears to be revolutionary in a world that solely treated material bodies with properties like size, shape, mobility and solidness. For example in proposition one of book one, gravity presents itself as a kind of centripetal force, or impressed force on a material body. Thus the body moving in a straight line will continue to do so until it experiences a gravitational pull (seen in the body’s movement from point B to C, C to D etc.) in which case it will diverge from a straight line motion produced by its inherent force. (B to c) Indeed, the gravitational pull might originate with various masses in various circumstances, manifest as various entities and the forces present-at-hand may be different with movement to movement of the body. As long as one is measuring these f orces by looking at the relationships of same kinds that exist in the phenomenon examined, the geometry utilized for describing the proportionality between