Well, we have not said anything new while the holidays have been going on.
That’s not about to change.
In the meantime you might want to take a look at the op-ed blog article in the New York Times about Newton. It actually explains quite a bit about calendars and various fixes that were put in place as the measurement of what we call a year improved. This also explains why we should celebrate Newton’s birthday for ten days instead of one.
Also, if you feel nostalgic for video games from the 70′s and early 80′s, maybe you can add a bit of gravity for the occasion.
“Think of the merchandise! Newton is said to have discovered the phenomenon of gravity by watching apples fall in an orchard. (His insight came after pondering why they always fall down, rather than upwards or sideways.)”
Before Newton we didn’t care much about special effects in Hollywood. It is well known that the Spilberg of the time was really upset after the stunts union complained that most of the things they were supposed to do were against
the laws of nature
Rediscovering gravity, after Newton’s leap (down) of course, must have been fascinating! I imagine good merchants extended the phenomena to other fruits and vegetables
Oh lord, it’d be great if things fall sideways by the way…
api niu iar everyone!
R
Okay, that was satisfying.
But I was thinking they were going to do something with Newton’s law of gravitation over larger distances, say around the earth. Or better yet, black hole equations of motion.
Some time ago, I derived the equations of motion for test bodies orbiting black holes in Schwarzschild and Gullstrand-Painleve coordinates in Newtonian form, that is, as an acceleration that depends on position and velocity, rather than the usual Christ-awful tensors. The accelerations are fairly simple and do not involve any trig functions though one does need a square root function. They can be used in games very efficiently. They form the basis for a interactive applet showing various facts about gravity that I wrote up to verify the equations.
Which reminds me, there’s a slight error in the Runge-Kutta differential equation method used in that simulation and I need to update it with the newer version I’ve got on my laptop. But the error only shows up as a slight inexactness in the knife edge black hole orbits and before I put the new code up I have to remove all the stuff I added to it to help do various calculations I was interested in.