Radio discussion of Newton's laws of
motion:
Newton maintained that he was modelling
gravitation, not hypothesizing ('hypothesis non fingo'), and as such it will be
eccentric to suppose he could be supplanted by an empirical hypothesis.
Nevertheless, Newton did speculate that his metaphysics led to the reasoning,
gravity therefore God. The transcendent unity represented by gravitation has led
me to conclude that the cosmos encapulates celestial bodies as a concomitant to
the capacity the conscious mind has for encapsulating ideas. The constitution of
God is the source of both the innate constitution of conscious minds and also of
the cosmos. When assemblages of God's various 'instincts' - if such be an
appropriate term - are encapsulated in the form of the constitution of a mortal
mind, so the objects of the cosmos are rendered palpable - via the fundamental
constants of nature, the very immutability of which underlies physicality.
Moreover, such an imposition of a determinate arrangement of the parts of God
thrusts them out of their more natural, unified state, and this is the source of
the perpetual tensions and physical operations evidenced by Newtonian
mechanics.
-- (Mostly paraphrased from my book 'The Birth of
Three Sides: A Theory of Dimensionality' (Ashgate, 1997))
Tom
