The Mystery of Physics 101

Hertz and his scientific contemporaries correctly viewed conceptual disharmony as the inevitable product of the evolutionary manner in which an initial descriptive practice gradually enlarges its applicational outreach, pragmatically guided by the discovery of fresh opportunities for calculating results in a useful manner. As a side effect of this increasing accumulation of technique, component words will become naturally pulled into subtly different forms of localized referential attachment. These discordant alignments create difficulties when a straightforward exposition of “fundamental principle” is wanted, as arises within an elementary class in classical mechanics (this is the “mystery” of the chapter’s title). Hertz, in particular, noticed that the word “force” behaves in a diverging manner, according to the comparative scale size of the object under consideration. This structural insight is crucial to unraveling the resulting conceptual tensions, but the axiomatic corrective that Hertz proposed leads to very unfortunate results, because such a scheme must artificially choose which of these usages of “force” should be favored as “primary.” Nonetheless, Hertz’s faulty presumption that axiomatics represents the proper vehicle for rectifying conceptual tangles of this character has turned into a widely accepted methodological dogma. It constitutes the foundational basis of the theory T thinking of which this book complains. Again the finer details outlined in this chapter are not essential for following the main argument of this work, but they nicely illuminate its motivational background.