Monday, December 06, 2004

Science, Faith, Religion, and Gravity

In a message board thread related to my last blog, I posted a response that included a discussion of how practicing science is not the same thing has having faith in something. The response argued that faith does not belong in the realm of faith, and vice-versa.

The message to which I was responding made a reference to gravity, so I took some time to put together a page off-site that gave a description of the development of some of the most well-known theories of gravity. This development is one concrete example of how no scientist has "faith" that "gravity exists." In fact, no scientist "believes" in gravity. No scientist ever makes existential statements about gravity.

I give that off-site page here, which has a link to the message board thread for which it was created. I hope that some other people find this topic of some interest.

If you're intersted in Newton, Einstein, Ernest Mach, special relativity, general relativity, and some history of all of them, I recommend you take a look at the link. It's a short passage, but I think the average reader will learn a little bit from it.

http://www.tedpavlic.com/post_gravity_faith.php

No comments: