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Up: The Emergence of Mechanics Previous: Statics

Physics as Poetry

This has been a long chapter; it needs some summary remarks. All I have set out to do here is to introduce the paradigms that emerged from Newton's SECOND LAW through mathematical identity transformations. This process of emergence seems almost miraculous sometimes because by a simple [?] rearrangement of previously defined concepts we are able to create new meaning that wasn't there before! This is one of the ways Physics bears a family resemblance to Poetry and the other Arts. The Poet also juxtaposes familiar images in a new way and creates meaning that no one has ever seen before; this is the finest product of the human mind and one of the greatest inspirations to the human spirit.

In Physics, of course, the process is more sluggish, because we insist on working out all the ramifications of every new paradigm shift and evaluating its elegance and utility in some detail before we decide to ``go with it.'' This explains why it is so easy to describe just how the concepts introduced in this chapter emerged from Newton's Mechanics, but not so easy to tidily describe the consequences (or even the nature) of more recent paradigm shifts whose implications are still being discovered. There is a lot of technical overhead to creativity in Physics.

A Physics paradigm shift is a profound alteration of the way Physicists see the world; but what do the rest of us care? It can be argued that such shifts have effects on our Reality even if we choose to exclude Physics from our immediate awareness. Examples of this are plentiful even in Classical Mechanics, but the first dramatic social revolution that can be clearly seen to have arisen largely from the practical consequences of breakthroughs in Physics was the Industrial Revolution, the origins of which will be discussed in the chapter on Thermal Physics.


next up previous
Up: The Emergence of Mechanics Previous: Statics
Jess H. Brewer
1998-10-08