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Did J.J. Thomson Discover the Electron?

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17 pointssohkamyung6 comments

Guess you can say Newton has discovered gravity. Even though he concerned very much the affect or spook force over a large distance.

How? And it was now replaced with field. Hence he is wrong.

Should we say because Newton had the wrong idea and therefore he is not the one discover the gravity.

Newton is "still right", but the scope of his theory has shrunk/been limited by discoveries that made it obvious it is not the final word.

For maro-events his theory still is applicable and useful. As an approximation, it also has engineering merit by virtue of being simple.

phrasing it this way rubs me the wrong way, it gives people without a good understanding of science the idea that scientists are just wildly wrong all the time like the way people are casually wrong all the time.

it's more like newton was 95% right, but einstein's successor theory was 99% right and covered some cases where newtons 95% right results were measurably wrong enough that it made an important difference. and we already know that einstein's theory has holes, we just don't know how to fix them

> Guess you can say Newton has discovered gravity.

Sure, you could say that, and it is said, and it is written quite often, but that statement would never be correct, not unless Aristotle (who had it wrong) and Galileo (who had it right) never existed.

It depends on what the meaning of "gravity" is. Is there one thing that is "gravity", or was Newton's gravity a different thing than Aristotle's and Galileo's?

If you want to insist that there is only one thing called "gravity" it gets kind of metaphysical, because nobody has ever totally understood it yet.

I mean, I'm fine with that, as one can define "gravity" as what makes the Earth go around the Sun, etc., but it's not dependent on specific humans, or any humans, ever existing.

If you do associate the concept with human theories, then I think you have to allow for it not being the same concept to all.

I think it depends only on whether Aristotle, Galileo and Newton were all describing, or attempting to accurately describe, the identical phenomenon. And I believe it is self-evident that they were, what we all now call gravity. Saying Newton discovered gravity is like saying Edison discovered electricity. Obviously, at some point, Newton discovered, or technically, rediscovered gravity and worked out some properties of it with less error than anyone before him.

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