On Mar 30, 12:35*pm, oriel36 wrote:

No need to pull sci.physics into the thread,the people there have
other things going on and it adds nothing to sci.astro.amateur.

Something I agree with totally.

I know I can't really persuade you that Newton's empiricism is the
"one true way" and your geometry and intuition are not, in fact,
leading you to the truth.

There would have to be a willingness on your part to accept that you
may be wrong, and I would have to fully address your concerns. I don't
really know what some of your concerns are, even though I have tried
to understand your posts to a limited extent.

If the high precision to which the motions of the planets are
predicted, and especially, if the predictions by which Neptune was
found - based on Newton's theory of gravity, his reduction of the
motions of the planets to inverse-square gravity plus empirically-
derived laws of mechanics - don't convince you that Newton _was_
right, I am at a loss as to what would.

But it is because we have all around us in our technology - such as
the computer you use to post to this forum - proof that science today,
with its empiricism and with its advanced mathematics, *is* on the
right track, that your advocacy of switching horses to a very
different way of thinking falls on deaf ears.

For your efforts to find "brave souls" to be more than an exercise in
frustration for you, you will need to do a great deal of rethinking -
and learning.

John Savard