Week 8 - Classic Physics

Newton’s three laws and me.

Newton’s three laws make me crave apples. I picture him sitting under a tree, with his wig, thinking his Really Big Thoughts. Plop! Ouch! Zowie! And a law is born.

Law 1: On object in motion stays in motion while an object at rest stays at rest. I think of Samson who is a Siamese. She’s pretty much an object at rest. The outside force that acts on her is limited to the sound of me opening a can which I think is funny because she doesn’t get fed canned food.


Law 2: The acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the force acting on it and inversely proportional to its mass. In this case, the force acting on Samson is directly proportional to how late it is at night when I come home. The later, darker it is, the greater her acceleration as she tries to escape the apartment when I get home.

Law 3: If two objects interact, say in a collision, the force exerted by object 1 on object 2 is matched by a force exerted by object 2 on object 1 of the same size, but in the opposite direction. In class I used the example of two vehicles in a head on collision. If each vehicle is a similar size and traveling at the same speed, the force of the collision is as if each vehicle hit a solid wall at double the speed of each vehicle. Golly, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen that law in action, I wouldn’t need school loans!

Our “energy efficient” culture

Well. We aren’t really an energy efficient culture at all here in the US. Our cars are the most obvious example of the lack of energy efficiency in our focus. Families of 4 simply don’t need a suburban or a hummer. In Europe, where gas has been very expensive for a very long time, the streets are filled with smaller, more fuel efficient cars. The public transportation is much better than anywhere in the US. And people actually walk places.

The sudden surge of gas prices last spring changed a lot for the US. People started using BART instead of driving or they carpooled and that was great. It made people so much more aware of how they spend their time, how and where they drive, when they can walk or plan more fuel efficient trips. As prices drop again, I hope that people remember these practices they enacted through necessity and keep it going.


That Decartes guy

Boy, if I could get my hands on that guy . . . ! Ok, I’m kidding. I think Western medicine is primarily a science based on reductionism. Especially surgery! Doctors tend to view disease as a simply the issue of the single organ system involved, rather than the function of a more global sort of phenomenon. I’ve been a participant of western medicine for a long time and spent a lot of energy thinking in this mindset. After spending three years here studying TCM, I have to say Descartes was pretty wrong. I can clearly see now how one system’s dysfunction relates to the next system’s dysfunction, and the next and the next and so on. The body is the sum of it’s parts but it isn’t quite as separate-able as Descartes might have surmised.