The Newton Challenge

THE NEWTON CHALLENGE

Daniel Preston was a research scientist working for the Institute of Common Knowledge, an academic research institution. He had been employed there for the past ten years and had made several modest contributions to the scientific community. Daniel had a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and a master’s degree in Physics. His boss, James Williams, had been the Director of the Institute for the past twenty-five years and ruled with an iron hand. Although James was a stickler for accuracy and detail, he wanted his staff to think he was open to new ideas.

           One Monday morning, James announced to Daniel and the other research scientists that the Institute would be holding a spring competition. The goal of the competition was for any research scientist employed by the institute to find a significant flaw in one of the established laws of science. They could choose any law they wanted to discredit as long as they could prove that the law had a flaw in it.

           Daniel was excited. This was a first for their usual conformist institution. Over the years he had been working there, he had noticed a lot of things he didn’t think were accurate but was afraid to say anything in case it would jeopardize his job. And now his meek scientist self was getting a chance to get out of his cage.

           That night Daniel went home and began digging through his old notes in the attic. He pulled out several hand-written notebooks that were filled with his observations. He dragged the notebooks down to the couch by the fire and began to search for a topic he could use in the challenge.

           And then he found one!

           They were notes he had made in his final year at university about the laws of Sir Isaac Newton. One in particular had irked him was Newton’s Third Law: “For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.”

           Daniel bore resentment against Newton mainly because of how old his laws were. Sir Isaac Newton, born in 1642 and died in 1726, was an English mathematician who was best known for his three laws of motion which became the foundation of mechanics. That was almost three hundred years ago. Daniel firmly believed that any laws that were followed in science today should be more recent than the ones from Newton’s day and age.

           He decided to make Newton’s third law the target of his challenge. He called his entry “The Newton Challenge”.

           The first thing Daniel did was explain what a “law” was. He said that laws were meant for common circumstances and should not apply to rare or freak occurrences. The law should contain only words and meanings that are applicable to ordinary situations and not to exceptional ones. That became the introduction to Daniel’s competition essay: “No law should be enforced when the conditions of that law are impossible or unlikely to achieve.”

           Daniel’s complaint was not in the main gist of Newton’s Third Law; it was in the supporting elements of the law. Daniel didn’t believe that “equality” could exist in a counter-action, or reaction, as Newton called it. Daniel believed that although actions often triggered reactions, those reactions were never equal in force to the original action.

           According to the dictionary, Daniel noted that the word “equal” meant “sameness in number, quantity, or measure”. But when analyzing a force exerted in a specific action, it was doubtful that the reaction would be the same amount of force.

           Daniel created an everyday example to prove his argument.

           A man goes into a bar and sits up on a stool to order his drink. While he is waiting, he elbows the guy sitting next to him. The other guy takes offence to the jab and pushes the first man off his bar stool.

The first action is the “elbow jab” which caused enough force to anger the second man. The reaction is the “shove off the stool”. The reaction is one with a greater force than the original action, not an equal one.

           Daniel went on to explain the word “opposite” was also inaccurate in Newton’s third law. Opposite implies an intrinsic relationship between the action and the reaction. Daniel noticed that many times there is no relationship at all between the action and reaction. Most of the time, actions were accidental while reactions were deliberate. Reactions could even be something entirely different from the initial action.

           Deciding to make a stronger point in criticizing Newton’s Third Law, Daniel went on to explain that this law was the founding principle of budding wars between two nations. An unprovoked hostile attack by one nation against another often triggered surprising reactions. While the initial attack could be a bombardment of missiles that destroyed a building, killing many civilians, the counter-attack could be something quietly less-hostile like a money-sanction order against the country who initiated the attack. Not only is this reaction unrelated in nature to the initial action, much less being an opposite one, it is definitely not equal in force. In this example, the money sanction could remain in place for many years after the war was over.

           Daniel decided to rewrite Newton’s Third Law to read: “For every action there is often an unrelated reaction or a reaction of greater force than the original action.”

           Daniel got the department secretary to type up his essay and made several copies. He stored one copy in the vault at the institution for safe-keeping and kept one copy at home. The third copy was to be his entry in the competition. He somehow felt sure his challenge would trigger off a reaction of its own. From who or from where, Daniel didn’t know. But he did know that scientists were a stodgy bunch that didn’t accept change easily.

           On the day of the competition deadline, Daniel handed the essay to his boss, James Williams. He watched James put the essay on top of the pile of other essays he was obviously collecting. “Thanks, Daniel. Best of luck to you.”

           Daniel smiled back and left the office.