Royce said:
The more we discuss this issue the more we agree. I never said that NP wasn't useful I just said it was wrong, its assumptions were wrong and its basic tenets were wrong and that Newton himself knew and admitted it. It worked and in most practical applications it still works within reason. That does not change the fact that it is wrong. I pointed this out as one example of it actually having happened in response to the original question of this thread.
Can we agree upon the following:
1)We must regard NP in its "ontological claims" dead wrong because it's predictions in several areas are way off from measurements we've made?
2)At these various areas, we cannot as easily dismiss the "ontological claims" of QM&GR for the reason that predictions we've made have a stunning match with the measurements?
3)That QM&GR can (and must) be regarded as more GENERAL theories than NP, because in the domain where NP works excellently, QM&GR in their respective limits reduce to the statement that "Newtonian effects" will be the most dominant effects of those we may measure?
(For example, in the limit \frac{u}{c}<<1, the Lorentz transformation will agree to a dominant degree with results stated by the Galilean transformation.)
4) If this hadn't been the case, (for example in that the Lorentz transformation did NOT reduce to the Galilean in the low-speed limit)
then physics would essentially have been sundered into 3 distinct regimes which had no way of talking to each other?
5)When dealing with complex phenomena in the region where the Newton approximation is excellent (let's say weather forecast, seismology, oil drilling, whatever), the reasonable scientific procedure is simply to disregard the "peculiarities" of GR&QM as simply unnecessary complications in our modelling practice.
If you agree to this, I retract all of my grumpier statements, and apologize..
