Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Does Newton's Second Law apply on live pigs?

What a silly question to ask. But do ya have the answer. You sure have to keep the pig on a frictionless surface and then apply a force, then calculate his mass and acceleration of it. Air resistance yes our dear old friend would come back, so keep him in a vaccum. Surely he will die in that then you wont have a live pig! What the heck what does it matter it is alive or dead or even a pig?

The point is the physics we have is so constricted where even an elephant can be reduced to a payint maass (point mass in my physics teacher's rendition of the word). Every observation and every nature of universe has to fall in the rule, whatever is incongrous an abberation, a deviation, an outlaw. Do ya see the similarity in majority democracy and cultural xenophobia? A short respite was seen in chaos theory (which is a effusive name of non-linear dynamics)

The second point is that the day we consciously used laws which are universal (applicable to anyone) we started generalizing stuff and started on the quest of universal theory of everything. The same rules should apply to nearly every object (or all objects of specific types like subatomic particles). The day we concluded that apples and planetary bodies are moved by the same force we started seeing them in the same light as a 'payint maases'. This basic minimalism of experiment, the construct of system, surrounding and observer are all signs of modern science.