For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Newton's Third Law of Motion.

Instead of posting links and quotes just google the title, it will be worth it to see other perspectives and how it effects nature.

I am primarily interested in examples that may go beyond motion and how it is true for other forces or objects. Does everything have an equal and opposite?

We can look at the obvious male\female, good\bad, happiness\sadness, day\night etc.

Posted in General Philosophy so as not to discuss the "Law of Motion" itself but to see how it is evident in other things. Where is this not true in other aspects of life?

 

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The clue may be in the name: Newton's Third Law of Motion.

How are these "equal and opposite"?

No, you appear to be claiming that it's evident. This has yet to be established.

Most of reality? :shrug:

 

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huh?

Try to explain this a bit better please.
As it stands, I cannot see how I can leave this thread in Philosophy....

 

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This is going to take some time. Leave it here for two days, I cant respond right now.

 

Fair enough.

I just can't see how you propose to discuss a physics concept outside of that context....

 

John99,

You know, after giving this some thought, although I'm admittedly guessing, I'm wondering if perhaps you're simply talking about the notion of reciprocity, in very general terms. The idea that some behaviour in turn is seen as 'causing' an other directed towards the precedent....

In which case.. we're not even talking about Newton's Third Law then.....


...dunno...

 

That's been raised (in passing) more than once over the years (including the spurious reference to Newton) by various posters. But no one, until now, (if that is indeed John's premise) has done anything more than vaguely wave their hand in its direction and then move on.

 

Indeed.

I've often been confused as to how some people think they can grab on to some principle or law of, say, physics, and feel like it's perfectly reasonable to extrapolate its application beyond its intended scope...

odd.

 

hehe

That's what I was (guessing) thinking of....

 

" What's the opposite of Friday?"

Friday is made up by humans.

Strength - Weakness

Hot - Cold

 

I thought about that. They come from the dirt, the opposite of dirt is water.

I guess this deals with high level and we trace things back we always find the equal and it seems like the opposite: Positive and negative, life and death, horizontal and vertical, open and closed, light and dark.

 

Dirt is the opposite of water? This is just ridiculous now. You are always going to end up with insurmountable logical difficulties when you try to apply a physical law that relates to a specific phenomena to anything and everything in the physical universe.

Besides, you're not even talking about reactions anymore, unless you are saying that dirt is a reaction to water (which is even more ridiculous).

 

In physics, there's statics as well as dynamics. If you go over to the wall and press your hands against it, it will effectively push back against you with equal force and your hands will feel pressure as a result. But nothing's moving. So it isn't always motion.

You seem to be getting at an idea that's a lot older and more general than Newton. It's a metaphysical idea more than it's a physical one. In today's philosophical style, it's more about logic and linguistics.

I'm thinking of the old Ionian idea of 'apeiron'. The Greek word literally means 'unbounded' (without perimeter), and Anaximander seems to have used it to mean 'formless'.

The idea here is of a basic formless... stuff, the idea (ancient even in the time of the Greeks) of primeval chaos, imagined as pure being. This original 'arche' (out-of) becomes the endless variety of particular things that we experience through the imposition of... shapes, boundaries, outlines... upon it.

So every individual thing that comes into existence as the result of the imposition of a particular form, divides reality (imagined as formless matter) into an 'inside' and an 'outside', into what each particular thing is and everything else that it isn't.

We still see philosophers proposing ideas like that, for example when it's suggested that words acquire at least part of their meaning by what they exclude. In order to know what X means, we have to have some idea of what ~X means as well, we have to have some idea what it means to not be X. It's often argued that the ideas of what something is and what it isn't go together and are inseparable.

 

The equal of a banana is a mango. Everyone knows that.
And as for Friday's opposite... that would clearly be Tuesday afternoon at 3:15pm, but only on a wet and miserable March day when people forget your birthday

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. It is the opposite of all the Friday's in the year.

Surely everyone knows these??

:shrug:

 

yin-yang ?

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Aren't "good" and "bad" made up by humans?

These aren't opposites: weakness is a lack of strength just as cold is the absence of heat.

What's the opposite of a worthwhile thread with a rational premise?

 

Busted? :shrug: