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Originally Posted by Joe Durnavich
(Ken: This illustrates where you and I differ in the model, mental, etc. discussions. Some people might think that Newton talks about a hidden or underlying force, but all he can discuss is what he sees, that is, the behavior of objects.
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Actually, I completely agree with Newton here, not with what you are imagining I am thinking. What you are missing is that Newton is not "discussing" anything, he could do that until he was blue in the face, with long treatises, perhaps waxing poetical. No, what Newton did was to
create a model, pure and simple. And it was pure, and it was simple-- it unified a vast amount of phenomena under a few simple principles. That is exactly what a
model is supposed to do.
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I don't consider that which we see as inferior symptoms of a superior underlying principle. You can think of me as championing the visible.)
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We
already had the visible, long before Newton. What we needed from Newton was a model that made the visible understandable and predictable, and that's just what we got.