On Saturday, June 7, 2025 at 1:34:14 PM UTC-6 John Clark wrote:
On Sat, Jun 7, 2025 at 3:00 PM Alan Grayson <[email protected]> wrote: *> I see you haven't looked at the link I posted.* *That is incorrect. * *> CM can be derived by several methods, such as applying Hamilton's or Lagrange's as the starting point. * *But if you were starting from first principles and had absolutely no knowledge that came from experimentation or observation then you would have no reason to think Hamilton's or Lagrange had anything relevant to say about classical mechanics. Hamilton's and Lagrange's methods are reformulations of classical mechanics, NOT derivations of it. They're different mathematical ways of expressing the exact same physical content that was originally found through observation and experimentation. And their reformulations were discovered centuries after Newton discovered his way of doing things. The methods of Hamilton's and Lagrange, and Newton's too, are powerful because they encode our empirical knowledge of how the world works, NOT because they can generate fundamental physical knowledge from pure mathematics alone.* IMO, the discovery of Inertia was not realized via empiricism. It's what you get when you forget about empiricism. AG *> So what Feynman did is irrelevant to the issue I've raised;* *Then why the hell did you mention Feynman and give a link to what he said?! * It's a long post, Somewhere he shows that energy is conserved along a closed loop. That was the point of the link. AG * > whether Conservation of Energy on a closed loop can be derived independent of the principles you cite. AG * *I see that you don't understand what a closed loop means in classical mechanics, Energy conservation doesn't demand a closed loop. * I see you read badly, a failing of convenience. I never alleged it did. I was just making the case that in one instance at least, conservation of energy is a logical conclusion of CM. AG * John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>* ez6 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/98e10eca-af2a-4dda-b718-3e6dfdd711b9n%40googlegroups.com.
