John D. Norton
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Modern writers often endow Einstein with a 21st century prescience about physical theory that, it just so happens, is only now vindicated by the latest results of the same writers' research. There is a second side to Einstein. His outlook and methods were clearly rooted in 19th century physics and a sense in which his work fulfills the discoveries of the 19th century. | "Einstein as the Greatest of the Nineteenth Century Physicists," pp. 142-51 in Proceedings, Seventh Quadrennial Fellows Conference of the Center for Philosophy of Science (12-14 June 2012; Mugla, Turkey). |
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Galileo's refutation of the speed-distance law of fall in his Two New Sciences is routinely dismissed as a moment of confused argumentation. We urge that Galileo's argument correctly identified why the speed-distance law is untenable, failing only in its very last step. Using an ingenious combination of scaling and self-similarity arguments, Galileo found correctly that bodies, falling from rest according to this law, fall all distances in equal times. What he failed to recognize in the last step is that this time is infinite, the result of an exponential dependence of distance on time. Instead, Galileo conflated it with the other motion that satisfies this 'equal time' property, instantaneous motion. | "Galileo's Refutation of the Speed-Distance Law of
Fall Rehabilitated," (with Bryan Roberts) Centaurus.54
(2012) pp. 148-164. Download. "The Scaling of Speeds and Distances in Galileo's Two New Sciences: A Reply to Palmerino and Laird," (with Bryan Roberts) Centaurus, 54 (2012) pp. 182-191. Download. |
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In 1824, Sadi Carnot proposed the strange, internally contradictory notion of a thermodynamically reversible process as the most efficient in the context of dissipative heat engines. They are analogous to the reversible geometrical movements that his father, Lazare, had earlier found to be the most efficient in ordinary, mechanically dissipative machines. | "How Analogy Helped Create the New Science of
Thermodynamics" Download draft. |