Conservation Principles

Abstract

As far back as we can go in recorded history we find that humanity has always looked for some kind of constancy in the universe and that many of its religious beliefs have sprung from the idea that an unchanging, all-powerful being controls the world of matter, mind, and spirit. These early, naive pictures, which assigned this being to a special place in the heavens and placed the earth in a central position below the heavens, were shattered by astronomical studies which show the universe to consist of bits of matter (the galaxies or clusters of galaxies) distributed very sparsely but homogeneously in vast regions of space. As far out as we can see with our optical and radio telescopes there is no observable difference between our region of space and any other region, so that there is nothing special about the earth, the sun, the solar system, or our galaxy. These observations indicate that the same natural laws that govern our earth and solar system govern all matter in the universe and apply to all regions of space. These laws, then, are the unchanging features of the universe. As we have seen, the statement F = ma is one such law, insofar as we can accept as true the Newtonian concepts of space and time.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

—isaac newton, Brewster’s Memoirs of Newton