Blog010

METAMORPHOSIS:
Everywhere there are numbers in the air.

Sir Isaac Newton

When Newton was first formulating his laws of gravity, he had one of two choices:
either each interstellar body moved in relationship to every other interstellar body or
there was one point around which the entire universe spun. Since Newton believed in
a God that sat on some immovable throne, Newton chose the latter idea.

At the time of Newton, Copernicus had already proven that the solar system revolved
around the Sun, not the Earth. Galileo had measured the rate at which bodies fall
towards the center of the earth (32 feet per second squared.) Pondering the
implications of these two ideas, Newton concluded that there was some force at work
here which was based on the mass of any two objects. Newton called this force
gravity.

Newton was a well-pressed academician and professor of mathematics. He used the
mathematical tools available to him at that time, calculus and tensor math, to predict
the movement of all the planets in our solar system. His theories were purely
mathematical and it remained to be seen if his ivory tower ideals had any basis in
reality.

The truth of Newton's theories came in the form of Ptolemy's planetary ephemeris.
Newton's theories accurately predicted Ptolemy's observations. Proof !!! The
conclusion of all this was that gravity was a force which was able to explain and
predict the motion of all interstellar heavenly bodies. Newton was happy and the
Church was happy. Harmony had been restored in the universe.

This worked very well for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in the
twentieth century, this idea went slightly askew. It just didn't explain enough.

Up until the twentieth century, science had been looking at only the BIG picture. With
the development of optics, people were able to see the universe for the first time on
the cellular level, then on a molecular level and finally on an atomic level. And, well,
poor old Newton just didn't work anymore.

At this point in the twentieth century, Niels Bohr creates a model of the atom,
Shrödinger kills his cat and Heisenberg says we can't be certain of anything. Right in
the middle of all this confusion comes along a grungy, grammar-school drop-out who
can't tie his own shoes, Albert Einstein.