Science Bleg
If you know about science, please could you help me with this curious little conundrum. In an article I’m writing I need to appeal to the authority of Newton’s laws of motion, but how do I cite them? Is there a standard science book which everyone uses and which lays out the basic laws of physics? Am I supposed to cite Newton himself? If so what is the standard edition? I know I shouldn’t have to prove something so basic and generally accepted, but the historians I’m arguing against have blatantly ignored the third law of motion and imagined something which is physically impossible!
Comment by Brett — 6:08 pm, 31 August 2009 [permanent link to this comment]
I think you could just pick any respectable first year physics textbook from a university library shelf and cite that. When I was a physics undergrad I had Halliday and Resnick, Fundamentals of Physics (which I see is now Halliday, Resnick and Walker), that’s been around a while and I think would be suitable. But really, the laws of physics shouldn’t vary from textbook to textbook so it doesn’t really matter which one you pick :)
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 7:00 am, 1 September 2009 [permanent link to this comment]
Thanks, I should be able to find that. I think this all shows that most historians need to know more about science.
Comment by Andrew Hickey — 1:05 pm, 1 September 2009 [permanent link to this comment]
Well, I don’t imagine it gets cited very often, but the obvious citation would be Newton’s Principia…
Comment by Brett — 2:25 pm, 1 September 2009 [permanent link to this comment]
I wouldn’t go to Principia as a source myself, because the issue is (presumably) the modern understanding of the laws of motion, not the 17th-century understanding of them.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 2:36 pm, 1 September 2009 [permanent link to this comment]
Yes, the idea is to show how modern science proves that this thing could never ever have happened like they say it did. Although the exceptions about very small things and very fast things that have since been found don’t apply in this case so I’d assume that Newton and modern science agree well enough for my purposes. But it would also be an advantage to be able to cite modern language that anyone can understand, even though I’m arguing with 17th century specialists.
That people in the 1640s wouldn’t have known Newton’s laws is a whole other issue, but it doesn’t really come into play because there’s very little evidence that they believed what modern historians have wrongly believed.