Frictionless Plane As A Pragmatic Methodology
Galileo died 40 years before Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica which described normal force (Newton's third law of motion), inertia (Newton's first law of motion), and most importantly, Newton's law of universal gravitation; he died nearly three centuries before Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity. Nevertheless, by thinking about the forces (as he understood them) acting upon an object on an inclined plane, Galileo came to understand the mechanics of the situation in a very fundamental way. From that understanding, he was able to extrapolate the general formula.
At bottom, the frictionless plane is a method of understanding otherwise opaque phenomena to make them receptive to experimentation and understanding. Galileo did not solve the inclined plane by performing experiments, considering the results, then attempting to reverse engineer a calculation that could accommodate those results. From what we now know, such an equation would have been incorrect, for any result is the combination of gravitational and frictional forces. Instead, he began thinking about how gravity works upon free-falling objects, and what about that force is the same, and what about it is different when an object moves down an inclined plane. It is this methodology that is so remarkable, and gives the frictionless plane its immense practical value.
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Famous quotes containing the words plane, pragmatic and/or methodology:
“We’ve got to figure these things a little bit different than most people. Y’know, there’s something about going out in a plane that beats any other way.... A guy that washes out at the controls of his own ship, well, he goes down doing the thing that he loved the best. It seems to me that that’s a very special way to die.”
—Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976)
“When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1934)
“One might get the impression that I recommend a new methodology which replaces induction by counterinduction and uses a multiplicity of theories, metaphysical views, fairy tales, instead of the customary pair theory/observation. This impression would certainly be mistaken. My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is rather to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits.”
—Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994)