Monday, April 30, 2007

Gravity is . . . Part II: Expanding Spheres of Light

Light expands, it does so inversely with the square of the distance from its source, and it does so uniformly.
Let’s ask a question. The sun is sitting in our sky, but in actuality, it’s sitting in empty space, space that’s empty but for the light that is streaming out from the sun’s surface. The sun has a specific surface area that’s defined by its physical size. That surface area is determined by a simple formula, pi, 3.1418, a constant determined by the relation of the circumference of a circle to its diameter times the diameter of the circle squared.
If we move away from the surface of the sun, the area of any sphere at any point is determined the same way. Therefore, as we move away from the sun, the area of the surface of a sphere any point defines increases by the square of its distance from the center of the sun. This is because the only term in the formula that is changing is the distance figure.
As we move away from the sun, the area of any sphere increases by the square of the distance, and therefore, the areas of spheres are increasing directly with the square of the distance.
This surface area is physically mirroring the inverse square expansion of light, that light diminishes inversely with the square of the distance from its source. If we keep this in mind as we think of the light being emitted in every direction from the surface of the sun, we can see that the light is expanding uniformly over the surface of an imaginary sphere whose area is expanding inversely with its distance from the sun.
When I refer to expanding spheres of light, many practical people can’t see what an expanding sphere of light is, but it is precisely as described above. Light is emitted, whether from a light bulb or the sun, and it expands into the area around it. As that area is defined in all directions as the area of a sphere around the source of expansion, and the area of spheres are related by the square of their distance from the source, light from the same source produces an expanding sphere of light at all points around it.
The "all points around it" statement raises another point. Whether a match, a light bulb, the sun, at any instant, the matter is emitting a new sphere of light. Thus, around any object emitting light, there is a volume of light containing spheres that have differing amounts of light depending on the distance of each sphere from the source of the light.
However, because light is emitted at any instant, any sphere emitted has a connection with the next sphere emitted. This connection is the point of emission. At any point on the surface, light is being emitted, and thus, the light emitted at that point is connected to the light in the sphere emitted the instant before and the light in the sphere that will be emitted in the next instant.
Thus, the particles that make up light are a part of the sphere in which they are emitted and a part of a flow of light, with all the flows of light in an expanding volume comprising the light of all the spheres.
You won’t find this in any textbooks and, if fact, you won’t find much at all about how light behaves. Textbooks pretty much describe the effects of light, what light does in a prism, diffraction grating or other affective material. This is because science simply doesn’t have the foggiest idea what light is. To science light is just a description, a wave or a particle, and science spends very little time actually looking at how light must behave in order for it to act the way we see it acting.
Going back to our flows of light, we know one thing about them. A flow of light that is emitted on the surface of the sun is going to expand as the area available allows it to expand. What does expand mean? It means that at any point on the next sphere, there is going to be less light.
The only conclusion that can be made from this is that the flow of light divides as it expands. Less light means less light, and to get from more light to less light, the existing light is going to have to split up so it can cover a bigger area.
These are inescapable physical facts of reality. Science doesn’t emphasize that light diminishes uniformly with distance simply because there’s no way it can explain how a wave might do that. Let’s face science’s analogy to water waves squarely. Water waves do diminish with distance, but light waves don’t, for instance, astronomers claim to see light from the beginning of time emitted from galaxies at the end of the universe, so light can’t diminish if they see what they claim they are seeing. And because their claims are fact, at least to them, light can't geometrically diminish.
Light is a three dimensional phenomena, it expands in all directions. Water waves, while breaking a plane into three dimensions, are two dimensional, occurring on the flat plan of the surface of the water.
And the deal-breaker, Young’s experiment that “proved” light was a wave, shows an image of light and no light on a collecting screen and then analogizes this to water waves where the crests cancel out the troughs. There’s not nothing at the point of cancellation, but something, water.
Light, no light, water, water. What wonderful analogy!
When it comes to light, science is still in the stone age, not because I have a better theory, but simply because I take the physical realities of light and explain what has to happen for light to behave the way it’s measured to behave.
Around an emitting object we have flows of light which, at any point, produce a sphere that defines the amount of light, with the series of spheres around the object expanding, allowing the light to expand and diminish uniformly in the process, which means, the flows are breaking apart to cover the larger surface area available at the point of expansion.
At this juncture, we have to ask the logical question about uniformity, why doesn’t the light simply overexpand? What is keeping the light from expanding in every direction, with some of the flows retaining their strength, others, losers in a battle for what must be predominancy, overexpanding into the area that the stronger flows bypassed?
We know that light expands uniformly. We don’t see the sun in blotches of light. A light bulb doesn’t light up one side of the room, leaving the other side dark. Unless physically obstructed, light expands uniformly. Why? What is regulating the expansion?
We know light starts off as an electrical phenomenon and we know it ends up as an electrical phenomenon. We can note that without electricity there would be no artificial light, but I’ve already noted that the surface of light producing matter is alive with electromagnetic forces. On the other end, when light strikes matter, the matter emits electrons, or at least this is the view of a science that creates a particle for every effect. Light is one effect and thus is represented by a photon, while electricity is another effect and is represented by an electron. The reason science treats the two as different effects is that electricity is clearly generated and passes through wires while light is not (or at least wasn't before fiber optics). The magnetic properties of an electric flow can be measured while the electric properties of light are absent.
However, the difference might simply be a difference on how the same particle is structured. Electricity produces massive flows of electrons while light is composed of very small flows that constantly get smaller as the light travels. However, that smallness of the flows would not account for the fact that light does not evidence electric properties except in its production and its dissolution.
Is there something about the structure of light that, even though light is composed of electrons, neutralizes the magnetic properties of the light?
If we produce a mechanism that regulates the expansion of light and that mechanism would, at the same time, neutralize lights magnetic properties while it was expanding, perhaps the objection that light is not composed of the same particle that electricity is composed of would disappear, at least for objective observers.
I’ll use recognized electrical phenomena to construct a mechanism that regulates the uniform expansion of light.
Constructing this mechanism is not hard, visualizing how it works not so easy. However, if we keep in mind the picture of flows of light breaking down over the surface of an ever expanding sphere which is a part of a series of spheres that make up the volume of light around an emitting object, we can actually understand how this mechanism both regulates light’s expansion and neutralizes its magnetic properties.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Gravity is . . . Part I: The Dynamic Source of Gravity

While Galileo apparently gets the credit for measuring how gravity accelerates matter, with the square of its distance, Tartaglia, earlier, had measured the angle at which a cannonball obtained optimal distance. This angle, 45º, was the same arc described by Galileo’s balls as they rolled off an inclined plane.
When an object accelerates with the square of its distance from the assumed source of the force, the Earth, it demonstrates a field that diminishes inversely with the square. Thus, gravity quickly became viewed as a force that diminished inversely with the square of its distance from the Earth.
Tycho Brahe is credited with making the first observation of gravity’s analogy to light, that both diminished inversely with the square of their distances from their sources. Descartes, the theorizer of gravity as a product of vortices in space, flirted with the idea that gravity must have something to do with sunlight, that the planets orbited and rotated as a result of the sun's emissions.
To Hooke, Halley and Wren, sitting in a coffee shop in the cold London winter hashing back and forth the possible cause of the motion of the planets, discarding Descartes’ speculation was simple. While the sun’s emissions as the cause of the motion of the planets might seem plausible, it didn’t answer the question of why the moon orbited the Earth or why objects fell to the surface of the Earth. The sun might well produce light, but the Earth didn’t. Therefore, any speculation that analogized light to gravity was ruled out at the starting gate.
Let’s dwell for a moment on the concept, raised in prior entries, of dead men who knew nothing creating unquestionable rules prior to the acquisition of all relevant facts. These three were meeting over coffee in the closing decades of the 17th century. It would be 200 years before Maxwell would propose the existence of the electromagnetic emission field (although he referred to it, because of the general understanding of light as a wave, as a spectrum).
This is 2 centuries between rule making and fact-finding. In the interim, another dead man who knew nothing, Young, would memorialize light to be a wave as a result of an experiment that analogized light to water waves when the experiment showed an absence of light and water waves always had a presence of water. In addition, a number of people would experiment with, and determine the boundaries of, electricity.
While science didn’t have to create a particle for light because, being a product of a wave, it simply didn’t exist other than as an effect of something else (science made up the aether as that something), it did create a particle to explain electricity, starting off a distinguished practice of making up a particle to describe everything, a practice that continued until an international agreement created the standard model, which limited the number of particles that could be made up.
These determinations by dead men who knew nothing are vary important to our inability to understand gravity because, while Maxwell’s electromagnetic emission field was composed of electrons, it also included the nonexistent light, which might lead someone to conclude that light was composed of electrons. Not science, though. Note that Young determined what light was without ever bothering to determine how it was produced, and when Einstein, a century after Young, demonstrated that light was indeed a particle, science didn’t abandon light as a wave, it simply created a particle to describe light and then called light a wave particle and proceeded to come up with fantastical explanations for how matter could produce light, matter which, by the way, had only been hypothesized to be composed of structured atoms by other dead men who knew nothing several decades before.
While this two centuries of who struck john might seem off-subject, it serves not only to shed some light on what gravity might be, it demonstrates the appalling ignorance that the three gentlemen in the coffee shop were strapped with. However, Hooke was no Newton. He believed in Bacon’s assertion that concepts could never be more than concepts rather than Newton’s fantasy that concepts could be proven to be facts. What happened with his speculations is not the fault of honest men making speculations but of rigid science turning concepts into fact.
The abandonment of any attempt to analogize gravity to light carried forward even after Maxwell placed light in the electromagnetic emission field in spite of repeated measurements to the contrary. When Edison invented the light bulb, one of the first things experimenters noted was the mass of magnetic fields that swirled around the filament. As the century went on and the sun became more susceptible to measurement, magnetic fields were measured broiling on its surface.
Regardless, science settled firmly into the belief that planets didn’t emit anything, holding solidly to the unmeasurable fantasy (up there with measuring the amount of matter in a planet) that the Earth received the same amount of sunlight in the day it radiated at night (including the addition of starlight at night, which also radiated in like amount).
This went on until the maverick Velikovsky predicted that radio waves, a part of the electromagnetic field, would soon be measured from Jupiter. When radio waves were measured consistently from Jupiter, science shrugged its shoulders, said Velikovsky’s prediction was based on no coherent scientific theory and was therefore not a prediction, and then pretended to have considered the possibility of radio waves all along.
However, it never once, nor has it to this day, admitted that Jupiter was emitting anything, claiming that atmospheric aberrations were broadcasting the waves.
And all this claptrap in the face of geography books that display a molten core of the Earth sitting down there glowing with as much brightness as glossy paper can display!
Anybody, and this includes the eminent gatekeepers of scientific orthodoxy, who doesn’t realize the Earth is hot and its heat, the act of undergoing cooling, is a dynamic process that produces an emission field, is simply bonkers.
Not only is the Earth hot, but, with the exception of Venus, all other planets are relatively hot and producing emission fields according to their size and distance from the sun. Venus, the object of much controversy as to the length of time its been a part of the solar system, is hotter than it should be, but other than that, we can expect Mars, smaller and more distant from the Earth to be cooler than the Earth (and therefore the host of life earlier than the Earth), the moon, smaller than the Earth, to be cooler, Jupiter, larger than the Earth by a bunch, to be hot, perhaps still with surface cooling going on as evidenced by the giant red spot which science attributes to everything but the obvious, molten lava showing through the crust.
None of this could be envisioned by Hooke, Halley and Wren sitting in the 1600s London coffee shop, and none of it was ever even fantasized by Newton, who created our ironclad view of dynamic gravity as a static property of matter.
And yet, if we think about it, there isn’t anything else matter can do but, for want of better term, undergo combustion and begin to cool. When matter undergoes combustion, it is doing so in a lesser field of heat and as heat flows from hot to cold, the heat moves in the form of emissions from what is cooling to where it is cooler. Just as the fire in the hearth cools, producing emissions that flow into the room, warming everything in it, the Earth cools with its emission traveling into the colder regions that surround it.
And, just like light, the electromagnetic emission field, produced by a dynamic process in matter, expands inversely with the square of its distance from its source, does so uniformly, and therefore requires something to regulate its expansion.
These are the same characteristics of gravity!

Saturday, April 14, 2007

What Do We Know About Gravity?

Newton set gravity as a property of matter in stone without knowing too much about it. He could, had he been of an analytical bent, sat down and listed the things we know about gravity, but that is not the way of science. Science seeks out concepts, ideas, products of the human mind, that it can claim are scientific fact, and then drops the scientific, claiming that it knows a fact it can never know, that gravity is a property of matter.
Science makes its claims to scientific fact long before all the facts are in, but once a scientific fact has been accepted by everyone as fact, there’s no going back. It’s true of gravity as a property of matter, light as a wave, and electricity as a moving charge. These are all statements that don’t tell us anything substantive, but which control our thinking about the nature of the items so labeled forevermore.
Basically, our picture of reality is controlled by dead men who knew nothing!
The two things Newton accepted as knowledge about gravity are that it is associated with matter and objects accelerate in its field with the sqaure of the distance over which they fall.
We know some other things about gravity.
One thing we know for sure, but which Newton and science refuse to recognize, is that gravity is a dynamic force. It moves objects from one place to another. Say what you will about the glory of Galileo, but his notion that gravity could not overcome momentum is simply absurd. Anything that can hold an object to the Earth can overcome motion, and thus Newton’s concept that gravity could overcome momentum is at least valid, if not applicable to the motion of the planets.
Science knows, or at least science should know, that a dynamic force cannot have a passive source. Gravity can overcome the motion produced by energy and therefore has to have as dynamic a source as the energy that produces the motion, whether that motion is produced by flowing water or jet fuel. Properties are characteristics we associate with matter in order to distinguish one type of matter from another. Properties let us categorize matter.
Thus properties are traits such as color, hardness and the like. These traits are not dynamic, but rather are simply the passive characteristics of a particular type of matter.
Properties do not produce energy and therefore gravity can’t be a property of matter.
When we look for the source of gravity, we have to look for something that is dynamic, something that is happening, if we want to find the source.
Experimenting with the effects of gravity on matter, we find out some other important information about the nature of matter, information that gives us insight into the probable mechanism that produces a force that causes objects to move back, with precisely increasing speed, toward the matter with which it is associated.
Weight is a very common experience in our existence. We know from childhood that some objects are heavier than others (the fact that Newton conveniently overlooked in constructing the first half of his proof that gravity was a property of matter).
We measure weight on a relative basis. We create a scale that allows gravity to move a particular object as far toward the ground (the source of the gravity) as it can while measuring on a relative basis the distance it allows other objects to move toward the ground. This leads to a conclusion science refuses to make, that gravity gives objects their weight. Science, believing that objects have some sort of mystical mass that produces weight, engages in such stupid pursuits as computing the weight of the Earth, when the weight of any matter depends on the gravitational pull that body is undergoing.
If gravity is what is producing weight in objects, then we would expect gravity to have no affect on the rate it causes an object to fall. This leads to a fourth fact we know about gravity. Regardless of weight, all objects fall within a frictionless gravitational field at the same rate.
This leads to still another fact about gravity, that objects within a gravitational field move against that force at different levels of force.
This is what produces weight, the ability to categorize matter on a relative basis by how much force it takes to move them against gravity.
These facts lead us to several more facts about gravity, facts that are perhaps a little subtler than the measurable facts.
If gravity accelerates objects with the square of their distance from the source of the gravity, then the gravity around the matter diminishes inversely with the square of the distance from the source of the matter. This is a mirror image of the fact that objects accelerate inversely with distance. Gravity can be considered to be a force emanating from matter (and anything emanating needs a dynamic source to produce the emanations) that surrounds the matter at any instance in a diminishing field. The further away from the source, the weaker the field, and the field is weaker precisely by the square of its distance from the source.
Reversing the acceleration measurement to show that the gravitational field diminishes, we find another very interesting fact about gravity, probably the most important fact of all. We find that an unimpeded gravitational field diminishes uniformly with its distance from the source of the gravity. We don’t see dropped objects speed up and then slow down, we see them uniformly accelerating toward the source of the gravity and therefore we know that gravity diminishes uniformly.
Why is this fact so important?
Because it provides us with the final, and absolutely most important fact, about gravity. With gravity diminishing uniformly, it needs a mechanism to regulate its expansion as it diminishes!
We therefore know 8 things about gravity, and as 8 things are far more than we know about many other things, they should provide us with a clue as to the nature of gravity, how it is produced, how it travels, and how it acts on matter to cause the matter to move.
The 8 things we know are:
1. Gravity is associated with matter.
2. Gravity accelerates objects with the square of their distance from its source.
3. It is a dynamic force.
4. Objects in a field of gravity fall at the same rate.
5. Objects moving against a field of gravity require different levels of force.
6. A gravitational field expands inversely with its distance from its source.
7. A gravitational field expands uniformly.
8. Expanding uniformly, gravity needs a mechanism to regulate its expansion.
Science congratulates itself on how well it uses analogy to uncover the nature of phenomena it seeks to explain. Analogy, science claims, is one of its most important tools.
Let’s see if we can find an analogy to gravity. All we need to do is find something that conforms to some of the 8 facts we know about gravity.
What could conform to some of those facts?
How about if 6 of the facts, on their surface, were identical to gravity? Wouldn't that lead us to suspect that the other two were also identical to gravity?
What are 5 of the facts identical to?
Light! It's associated with the matter producing it, it is dynamic (all you have to do to prove it's something is focus the sun's light with a magnifying glass on some cotton), it expands inversely from its source, it expands uniformly, and it therefore needs something to regulate its expansion.
What facts aren't, on the surface, identical to light?
Facts 2, 4 & 5, objects accelerate inversely, are measured to fall at the same rate and rise with different levels of force in a field of gravity.
What do facts 2, 4 & 5 equate to?
Gravity!
Does science pursue the analogy?
No, because one of its dead men who knew nothing has already determined that light is a wave and therefore nonexistent.
Can’t analogize something that exists, a property, to something that doesn’t exist, light!
Ah, the glory that is science.

Saturday, April 7, 2007

Admittedly Unproven, Why Does Science Accept Gravity as a Property of Matter?

Newton died at the end of the 1720s, the subject of universal adulation. He had, during his lifetime, created what we would call today a cult of personality. He was considered infallible, his creation of universal gravitation, Celestial Mechanics as it came to be known, a milestone in the march of humanity from ignorance to light.
While his mathematics, designed to show that the amount of gravity in the Earth and the moon equaled the amount of gravity it would take to curve the moon’s straight-line motion into circular motion, and therefore that gravity was proportional to and therefore a property of matter, still fell short of his goal, few people were capable of understanding his math, and fewer still his reasoning, and he had long since discredited any reputable scientist who had deigned to disagree with him. It took poets like Alexander Pope to venerate his memory.
He needed poets because, as the 18th century progressed, Newton’s equations were increasingly applied to the planets and found to be wanting, and not in amounts that could be dismissed as minor.
An honest science, one that was interested in self-correction, that actually wanted to uncover the true nature of reality or at least attempt to come as close as humanly possible, would have said, well, we tried, but it didn’t work. Let’s go back to the drawing board and figure out exactly what’s going on.
Unfortunately, science wasn’t then, nor has it at any time since, been interested in correcting its mistakes simply because its mistakes are so ingrained, not on a theoretical or factual basis, but on the basis of religious mantra, the dogmatic repetition by the unwashed masses, gravity is a property of matter, that once its conclusions are out there, science can never go back.
The reason it was forced to stand by Newton’s conclusions in the face of his failed proof was a part of the contest of the times. In the 18th century, the unwashed masses still believed in biblical conclusions, and biblical conclusions were dictated by religious authorities. There are only so many seats at the banquet table, and there were not enough seats for both religious authorities and scientific authorities to feast. A life and death battle was going on to determine who should shape the picture of the world for the unwashed masses. Religion had performed the function, and reaped the benefits, for thousands of years. The new religion of science was shouldering its way to the table, in the process elbowing religion away.
Great battles, including the origin of man and the age of the Earth, battles that had little to do with science but much to do with capturing the minds of men, were looming. Science couldn’t just admit that its founding principle, the explanation for the most puzzling phenomena we experience, falling objects, was erroneous. What would that mean in its battle for supremacy over religious explanations? Such a large helping of egg on the face might be fatal to the young science gaining a foothold over the popular imagination.
Therefore, it wasn’t a question of Newton being wrong that faced science, it was a question of where Newton went wrong.
In the opening decades of the 19th century, William Whewell would write volumes on the history of science, focusing on the scientific method. Inherent in all this verbiage was an organizing principle, that Newton’s induction of gravity as a property of matter was valid regardless of his failure of proof. Whewell is absent from the scene today, with chronological listings dealing with the scientific method stopping in the 18th century and beginning again in the 20th, but Whewell’s verbiage went a long way to justify what science was carrying out on a practical level.
I was once asked to document the fact that Newton’s proof of gravity failed, leaving gravity an unproven assumption with not even the status of scientific fact, but I don’t have to prove it. All I have to do is refer the reader to Newton himself, his logic and mathematical process in proving the hypothesis, and what science does today with the hypothesis.
It is quite simple, really. Science said Newton’s process was flawed because he was using the motion of the planets, the amount of matter in the moon and the Earth combined with the orbit of the moon, to predict the motion of the planets.
What he should have been doing, science now claims, is to have used the orbits of the planets to determine the amount of matter in the planets.
Think about this turnaround for a minute. Newton used the amount of matter in the moon and the Earth to predict the orbit of the moon. The orbit he predicted was the actual orbit of the moon as altered by gravity from its straight-line course. Science is saying we use the orbits of the planets to compute the amount of matter in the planets.
Newton devised his process because he was trying to prove gravity was a property of matter. To make this proof, he attempted to show that gravity was proportional to matter.
If gravity isn’t demonstrated to be proportional to matter, then there’s no proof that it is a property of matter.
How does science’s interpretation of gravity demonstrate that it’s proportional to matter?
It doesn’t. It merely uses Newton’s math (more or less) to compute the amount of matter in a planet.
Newton needed to know the amount of matter, and therefore, gravity in a planet in order to compute proportionality. Science says we assume that gravity is a property of matter and therefore proportional. We then determine the amount of gravity in a planet using its orbit and use proportionality to convert that gravity to matter. Because the matter doesn't conincide with size, we call the matter thus computed mass.
Instead of using gravity to predict orbits, science is using orbits to predict gravity, and because gravity is proportional to matter, predicting the amount of matter in a planet.
What is the one tenet of science that must never be violated?
Any hypothesis must produce measurable predictions.
Is the amount of matter in a planet measurable?
Absolutely not. No one, and this was Newton’s fallacy, knows the proportion of the different densities of matter in a planet, and therefore the use of Newton’s unproven theory to demonstrate the amount of matter in a planet is inherently unscientific.
Science basically said we have to save Newton, but how do we do it? We simply accept Newton’s conclusion, then use Newton to produce all sorts of fuzzy math that results in meaningless conclusions. The beauty of the thing is, like black holes and dark matter, the meaningless conclusions, being meaningless, can never be disproved, and therefore, no one can ever challenge them.
The result is, we have universally come to believe our own subterfuge. We believe we have answered questions we haven’t, and we believe that we have answered questions that we can never answer, increasing the awe with which we view ourselves.
And all the while, we are abysmally ignorant of the most basic forces in our existence. We have no idea what the mechanics of gravity are, we ignore totally the fact that for the planet to rotate under the friction of the atmosphere, it has to have a current force causing it to rotate, accepting instead the fiction of inertia, crippling meteorology in the process. We have absolutely no idea why the moon or the planets are moving, and using Newtonian assumptions, we lose billion dollar spacecraft as a matter of course.
We think we know everything and we know absolutely nothing, and if you think Newton created a can of worms with gravity, imagine what a can of worms our own ignorance is creating.

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

What’s with Straight-line Motion?

To prove that gravity is proportional to and therefore a property of matter, Newton said that but for gravity, the moon would be traveling in a straight line.
The most obvious question, other than how does anyone know how the moon will be traveling without the force of gravity affecting its motion, is, what in the universe travels in a straight line?
Well, there’s one thing that does, a falling object so long as nothing interferes with its fall. But the moon is not a falling object, and even if it were removed from the Earth’s gravity field, it would not be a falling object, unless of course, it fell into the sun.
So there’s little chance the moon would be moving in a straight line. Where is there any object in space that is moving in a straight line? Nothing does, and to say nothing does because of gravity is sort of distorting the point. To move in a straight line, the moon would need a force moving it in a straight line, and the absence of a force moving it in other than a straight line.
Where is the force that is moving the moon in a straight line?
There is none!
Actually, Newton needed the moon to be moving in a straight line for one reason, and one reason, only. If the moon weren’t moving in a straight line but for the force of gravity, there’s no way he could compute the amount of gravity it would take to move the moon from its straight line motion, and thus, he wouldn’t have a second equation with which to balance his first equation.
His first equation dealt with the amount of gravity between the moon and the Earth and he assumed both bodies were made up of a uniform particle uniformly distributed in order to make the computation, a notably false assumption. Now in order to balance the first fallacious equation with a second equation, he had to make up another “fact,” he had to assume the moon would be traveling in a straight line but for the force of gravity.
Galileo had experimented with metal balls rolling down an inclined plane to come up with his own view on motion. As the metal ball gained momentum from falling down the inclined plane, it carried that momentum with it when it reached the end of the ramp and was let loose to fall in space. As gravity reclaimed its motion, the metal ball lost its momentum.
Galileo called this momentum inertia. Up until Galileo clouded the issue, the general consensus was that a moving object would eventually come to rest because of gravity. Galileo, in creating the concept of inertia, believed that if he rolled a ball down an inclined plane and up another of equal height, the only thing stopping the ball from reaching the same height was friction. If he could remove the friction, the ball would reach the same height from which it had started its roll.
From the first guy to measure the nature of gravity, this is pretty misguided. What Galileo is claiming is that gravity has no affect on the motion of the ball. Newton couldn’t really use Galileo’s inertia, which was only overcome by friction, because then his computation of gravity between the Earth and the moon wouldn't be capable of overcoming the straight line motion of the moon.
As a result of this little problem, Newton neither agreed with the general thinking that objects would eventually come to rest as a result of gravity, nor Galileo’s thinking, that the only thing restraining inertia was friction, Newton had to go to great difficulty in beginning the Principia with a restatement of the laws of motion. He needed a law that would justify his second equation, that the gravity of the Earth and the moon were overcoming the straight-line motion of the moon.
Newton therefore very carefully rephrased all prior points of view in a manner blatantly favorably to what he was attempting to do on a theoretical basis: Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.
The general thinking was, a moving object would come to rest as a result of gravity. Galileo’s was, inertia, once acquired, could only be overcome by friction. Newton turns both observations on their heads, and note I say observations simply because Galileo merely hypothesized a condition in which no friction existed, he didn’t say such a condition existed, by assuming motion, motion in objects that simply didn’t exist in reality.
And he did so quite cleverly. He created one law in which half the law dealt with observable reality and the other half dealt with a hypothetical reality, a reality based on no observable reality, and he made it sound so very reasonable. An object at rest will stay at rest and an object in motion would stay in motion unless another force intervened. Who could disagree with the statement? It was obviously a true statement. An object in motion would indeed continue in motion unless another force intervened. It’s only common sense.
The only problem with the dual statement is, there’s no equivalency between the two because the physical situation of each of its parts is not similar.
When an object is at rest, we know why it is at rest. It is at rest because of gravity. An object at rest with respect to gravity will continue at rest until some force overcomes the gravity.
However, an object in motion assumes that there is a force maintaining that motion. In our experience, or anyone’s experience, objects don’t move without a current force causing them to move.
Newton didn’t rely on Galileo’s inertia to keep his moon moving in a straight line but for the force of gravity because Galileo concluded that it would take friction, not gravity, to overcome inertia. Thus, Newton, a very religious man, simply said that God would keep the moon moving in a straight line but for gravity (for someone reputed to have uncovered how the solar system operated, Newton’s view of the planets was fairly parochial).
In fact, it wasn’t until the end of the 18th century, when science was shedding itself of religion, that it became necessary to replace Newton’s God with the ad hoc swirling mass of gas evoking, what else, but frictionless space, or Galileo’s inertia, ignorant as that era was of Newton’s carefully crafted law of motion to do away with the Galilean concept of inertia.
Today the planets move because of Galilean inertia, but their straight-line motion is overcome by Newtonian gravity.
Science unabashedly uses two conflicting concepts to explain something, while admitting the whole thing is a can of worms.
The fact that both sides of Newton’s equation were based on false assumptions pales in comparison to what science did when, toward the end of the 18th, and during the beginning of the 19th centuries, science discovered that Newton’s equations didn’t work anywhere in the solar system.