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- Aug 7, 2001
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You do come out with some old cobblers, concocted from your faulty remembrance of something you only understood imperfectly in the first place.Ghostisfort said:What seems to be unknown by most, is that Newton's law of universal gravitation was never completed. Both he and the astronomers of his day failed to plot the position of the Moon using it and the astronomers are recorded as reverting to the old tables.
Incidentally, the old tables were probably compiled by astrologers.(I'll check)
We are still lumbered with the self same law.
Here's Newton's Law of gravitation: F = G.m1.m2/r^2
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_uni ... ravitation )
That's it, complete, finished, done and dusted! Secondary school kids can understand it.
"It is a part of classical mechanics and was formulated in Newton's work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("the Principia"), first published on 5 July 1687."
But Newton went much further with his Principia: he showed that the inverse-squared law led to orbits under gravity that are Conic Sections (usually ellipses), and he showed how this led to Kepler's laws of planetary motion; that extended (spherical) bodies act as if all their mass was concentrated at their centres; and he showed how tides are raised by the Gravity of Sun and Moon. Furthermore, he showed how gravity acting on the bulging equator of the Earth caused the Precession of the Equinoxes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi ... athematica
Pretty damn good for an 'incomplete law'!