Isaac Newton's Third Law Of Physics

Introduction Living our day to day lives we scarcely stop to think about the reasons for things in our lives. We do not spend every waking minute thinking about what was the origin of what it is that we did or what we experienced. It is hard to imagine that the boiling of a cabbage in the kitchen of a restaurant on the other side of the country, because one of the restaurant’s chefs was sick and another less experienced chef burned its specialty cabbage casserole thus requiring the boiling of a secondary cabbage, was able to add the last bit of water vapor to the gathering clouds a mile above needed for it to reach its full capacity. And that due to that small action taken by a cook hundred of miles away you were caught out in the rain on …show more content…
This idea is most commonly reflected in Isaac Newton’s Third Law of physics stating, “every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” This attributing the cause of the reaction to the action. This coupled with Newton’s First Law that states that, “an object in motion stays in motion while an object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an unbalanced force” provides the basis of causality in physics. As it is present in physics, this line of reasoning is also an accepted idea in all of the natural sciences and is the principle that keeps the scientific method valid. If events were not causal then reproducibility would be impossible and events could not be tested. Causality does not solely live in the realm of the natural sciences. The concept is also present in the methods of observation within the human sciences. Possibly the most publicly relevant is causality within psychology. The Freudian origin of modern psychology has left an impact that previous experiences and events affect what our thought and actions will end up, to an extent, to be. Similarly historians study the events of the past to view what their effects have been and how people’s actions have affected them. History is the study of the causal chain of humanity on a macroscopic …show more content…
Determinism is the concept that our actions and our decisions have causal influences. This is limited within the scope of Philosophy and Ethics and does not extend to the natural sciences such as Physics and Chemistry— though it could be applied in that context in subfields such as the Philosophy of Science. Determinism can be broken up into a spectrum of flavors (which will be discussed further later) but is primarily divided into the adjectives of hard and soft determinism. Indeterminism is the concept that the doctrine of determinism is not universally true. Philosophers who advocate for this view of (or rather lack thereof) causal morality are known as Libertarians, not to be confused or associated with the political ideology of the same name. Between the two beliefs of determinism and indeterminism there sits the doctrine of compatibilism. The specification of compatibilism is that “determinism is logically compatible or consistent with what is said to be a single idea of freedom that really concerns us and with a related kind of moral responsibility -- the freedom in question being voluntariness” (Honderich). Compatibilism is a medium between the two in that it does not justify determinism but takes the stance that neither determinism nor free will conflict with the other