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To: Ha Ha Thats Very Logical
What is an experiment on Earth that would test the proposition that gravity is proportional to a body's mass and inversely proportional to the square of its distance

Calculating the motion of the moon and planets -- that is, ahead of time, not after the fact -- and testing to see if the moon and planets move according to the hypothesis.

They do. Over hundreds of predictions -- that is, ahead of time, not a reconstruction -- Newton's Laws correctly state the motion of bodies in space.
145 posted on 04/16/2014 5:06:45 PM PDT by Moseley (http://www.MoseleyComments.com)
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To: Moseley
Over hundreds of predictions -- that is, ahead of time, not a reconstruction -- Newton's Laws correctly state the motion of bodies in space.

As I said before, the ancients were able to predict the motion of bodies in space--the ones they could see, anyway--long before Newton. Also, Newton's Laws wouldn't help us determine their motion unless we knew their mass. In reality, the process is the opposite of what you state: we agree that Newton's Law is correct, we observe the motion of bodies, and thereby we calculate their mass.

"Accepted science" is a contradiction in terms....Questioning everything is the heart of science.

Nonsense. Yes, science begins by asking questions. But at some point, we agree that one of the possible answers appears to be pretty much correct, so we "accept" it as accurate and move on from there. At that point, we can start investigating the details of how the accepted answer operates in practice, but for the most part we don't keep going back and asking the original question all over again. Doctors don't keep questioning germ theory; geologists don't continue to wonder what causes earthquakes; and biologists aren't still questioning the theory of evolution. Sure, some maverick might overturn any of those by re-asking the original question and coming up with a different, better answer--like Copernicus did to Ptolemy--and more power to them. But in the meantime, some theories are "accepted science"--as they should be.

The last thing I'll say is to repeat that I'm glad actual scientists don't feel constrained by the limits you try to put on them, or there's be vast areas of knowledge we just wouldn't have.

149 posted on 04/17/2014 12:05:19 PM PDT by Ha Ha Thats Very Logical
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