I thought of that this morning, and now feel like quite the idiot. :facepalm:I don't think you understand what Newton was saying. He was basically saying "My theory, as it stands, can't be the whole story", and in other quotes, he basically added to that, "but I don't know what the rest of the story is".
He would have given Einstein a big sloppy wet kiss, because General Relativity, while it doesn't solve all the problems he had with his own theory of gravity, did at least solve some of them.
And Einstein had a lot of the same reaction to "spooky action at a distance" in quantum physics that Newton had to "action at a distance" in his own theory of gravity.
No more late-night wikipedia-reading after this.
---------- Post added 29-04-11 at 01:41 AM ---------- Previous post was 28-04-11 at 02:07 PM ----------
So much for not thinking too hard late at night.
Out of boredom I tried rediscovering e by implicitly differentiating the function y=e^x when x=0 and dy/dx = 1.
[math]\frac{dy}{dx}=\frac{d}{dx}e^{x}[/math]So far so good.
Using the power rule on e^x divides by zero at the x-origin, and I'm not in the mood for first-principle, so I'll go with what trusty Wikipedia tells me, which is that the derivative of e^x is e^x.
[math]\frac{dy}{dx}=e^{x}[/math]dy/dx = 1 here so...
[math]\log_{e}1=x[/math]x=0 so
[math]e^{0}=1[/math]Well, duh! Anything to the power of zero is 1. So e could be 2.71828, it could be 42, it could be 8.95e269 or [math]\sqrt{2\pi}[/math].
So how can I find e? Was my reasoning wrong? Am I just stupid? :idk: