From Newton’s creation to Einstein’s creation On Knowledge – III

By Prof. Nalin de Silva

(February 11, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) When Archimedes ran naked shouting "eureka" (let us assume he did so) he exposed not only his body but the nakedness of discovery. The run was symbolical and with hindsight we could say that instead of running naked he could have come out soberly from the bathtub and said I created the concept of density or specific gravity which is the density of an object relative to that of water.

All concepts are our creations and it is not necessary to have words to describe concepts. If that was the case then small children who do not know any words would not have concepts, though some postmodernists have come to the conclusion that babies do not think. It is clear that the babies can think better than these postmodernists who can only think in terms of others, assuming of course that what is expressed by each category reflects what is thought. The small children who do not know any words express themselves using sign language and they would not have done so without concepts. If we assume that the early cave men did not have a language then their paintings illustrate that they had concepts may be in the form of what we would call citta rupa. The concepts may be verbal or non verbal and they are creations of people and animals.

Let us consider one of the so called greatest discoveries in history, namely Newton’s gravitation. It is Newton’s gravitation and his theory of gravitation in more than one way and the western scientists have to be congratulated for naming these theories after the scientists who created them. The theories belong to them as they created them. Of course one could say that they are so called universal theories and they are named after the relevant scientists as they discovered them. Now let us see what Newton had done. The account presented here is due to Einstein another great in western science, and not the creation of a person who could become a professor in a Sri Lankan university only after he reached his sixtieth year, and hence the worthy Sri Lankan scientists not to mention the other pundits do not have to spend many a sleepless nights over the example.

Consider a rocket moving in a certain direction, indicated by an arrow in the figure with an acceleration. Let us assume that it is a very big rocket carrying people scientists, modernists and postmodernists among them, laboratories, supermarkets, schools, hospitals and other buildings, roads etc. Let us also assume that the people in the rocket cannot communicate with the outside world and though the rocket is moving with an acceleration the scientists inside it are blissfully unaware of it. Now an enterprising scientist decides to drop an object. The object when released by the scientist would have moved with the same velocity with which the rocket was moving at that instant but it would not have acquired the acceleration of the rocket. As a result the relative velocity of object with respect to the scientist who would have moved with the same acceleration as the rocket would be in the direction opposite to that of the acceleration and the velocity of the rocket. In other words the object would have moved in the direction opposite to that of the motion of the rocket with increasing speed with the rocket accelerating. Now the scientist in the rocket does not know anything of the motion of the rocket and he comes to the conclusion that the object moves with an acceleration in the direction of his feet, assuming of course that he is standing on his feet and not on his head.

Now our scientist being a good one faithful to the so called scientific method, wants to repeat the experiment (or the observation), though Darwinian and neo Darwinian evolutionists cannot repeat the observations on evolution and historians or historical materialists cannot ask the question what would have happened if Marx was not born. Not every observation can be repeated even in so called scientific studies, and strictly speaking not a single experiment or observation can be repeated. However, we will not delve into such questions and will follow the good scientist in the rocket who decides to repeat the experiment. The scientist will observe that each object dropped would move towards his feet with the same acceleration, something Galileo observed in the space ship called the earth.

The scientist then communicates his findings to the other scientists in the rocket and some of them repeat the experiment of dropping objects. Every time an object was dropped it moved towards the feet of the scientists and the scientists true to their form generalize the result of the observation not only to the past and present objects but to future objects as well. The scientists are not content with what they have observed and generalized but want to know why all the objects irrespective of the mass, volume, shape or any other property of the object move towards their feet with the same acceleration, when released. The scientists and others get together and create the concepts of up and down and concepts such as under. The down is the direction in which the objects move when dropped and up is the opposite direction. The question of the scientists could be formulated in different words or concepts.

They could ask the reason as to why the objects released always move down with constant acceleration. Then a very creative scientist comes before his peers and announces that there is an attractor under the rocket and it attracts all the particles towards it. He would even come out with an equation to calculate the acceleration, which would show that all objects dropped near the feet of the scientists or near the floor of the rocket would move towards the floor with constant acceleration. Now the question is whether there is an attractor under the rocket. It is something that nobody can observe and if one decides to leave the rocket in order to observe it one would not return. In spite of the fact that nobody has seen or observed this great attractor and that the attractor is not sensory perceptible the scientists and others in the rocket would believe that there is an attractor under the rocket due to the fact that all the deductions made with that assumption would be consistent with the observations.

That is exactly what Newton did when he came out with his theory of gravitation. He created a gravitational force later to be replaced by a gravitational field, in order to explain why objects move towards the earth with constant acceleration near the earth when released. His theory could give the correct orbit for projectiles and even for the motion of the moon. However the gravitational force or the field is not sensory perceptible and there were some discrepancies and the western world had to wait for Einstein to come out with a different reason for the fall of objects near the earth, and also for the motion of the planets. That reason was nothing but Einstein’s creation.

-Sri Lanka Guardian