Alternatives to Kepler and Newton





(the warmup exercise!). There is no such thing as gravity: instead, each object has a demon attached to it who pushes down. To stop the demons, you must push upwards with an opposite force. This "theory" explains why Disprove this theory!
(harder) There is no such thing as gravity:
instead, the universe is filled with invisible particles, which travel in all directions. Large bodies "shadow" these particles: hence there will be an unbalanced pressure of particles.

This gives a force that mimics gravity (i.e. it falls off as 1/r2). Disprove this theory!

Velikovsky: although the Solar system is reasonably stable today, it has changed hugely over the last 5000 years Disprove this theory!
Einstein : there is no such thing as a gravitational force. Instead, when you see planets moving in an ellipse, they are actually moving in straight lines in a curved space. Disprove this theory!
What do we conclude? Most of the time we can use Newton's theories, providing we remember when they break down.
We now want to look at a number of consequences of Newton's laws, which take us far beyond what Newton envisaged:
  1. To progress any further, first we have to understand systems that oscillate...so we can understand something about waves so we can understand something about light and sound.
  2. We will then look at HeatKinetic Theory of Gases and Chaotic Motion
  3. Then we can go back and look at... Cosmology