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h1. Animistic vs. Newtonian Worldview

Newtonian Mechanics is extremely difficult to understand because it contradicts the intuitive sense of motion that you have developed in order to flourish in their everyday world. All higher animals, including humans, have evolved primitive ideas and specific neural pathways to deal with motion because it is so important in our environment. For example, your eyes will accurately track the simulated motion of a ball rolling down and then up a bowl-shaped path. If the ball slows unnaturally on the way back up, your eyes will point to where the ball should be until your brain realizes that the ball has been delayed and your eyes jump tack to where actually appears.  This type of adaptation allows you to predict and avoid leaping tigers, falling branches, hurled missiles, etc.

You also have ideas about motion, called phenomenological primitives, that you regard as true without further intellectual justification and upon which you base your everyday thinking. Examples are "a bigger force causes a larger motion", "heavy objects experience more friction with the ground than light objects", etc.

One phenomenological primitive concerns the natural state of motion of an object.  All theories of motion start here: what is the motion of an isolated body, i.e. one with no forces applied to it?  

In the Aristotlean view, the natural state of an object is at rest at the center of the earth, consistent with his view that gravity was the only "natural force". 

In the animistic view of motion in vogue in the Middle Ages, the natural state of an object was at rest with respect to its surroundings.  Ask yourself, don't you intuitively believe this?  Look around you. Objects on your desk and around the room are indeed stationary with respect to their surroundings - even on a fast moving airplane (driven at constant speed by the force of its engines), objects inside the craft are at rest with respect to their surroundings.

The Newtonian view, set down in Newton's [First Law of Motion|Newton's First Law] directly contradicts this:

*[Newton's First Law]:* {excerpt-include:Newton's First Law|nopanel=true}

{info}Or perhaps the contradiction is thisnot aso direct contradiction?.  Newton's Law really describes the motion of an object _in the absence of surroundings_.  The important advance here is that Newton realizes that the surroundings must _act_ to bring the object into a relative state of rest.  Newton asks us to consider carefully _how much influence_ a moving object's surroundings exert on it, which leads to a quantitative study of [interactions|interaction] and thus to Newton's [Second|Newton's Second Law] and [Third|Newton's Third Law] Laws.{info}

Newton's First Law is so counterintuitive that it is easy for students to believe that physics professors spend too much time in an abstract world that is fundamentally different from the real world.  As poetically stated by one middle school student trying to get her mind around this dichotomy,
{center}{_}Objects in motion remain in motion in the classroom and come to rest on the playground.{_}{center}

Importantly, over 300 years of scientific discovery confirms that you must modify your intuition to adopt Newton's first law as your phenomenological primitive.  When you see a sliding book come to rest, you must realize that this is unnatural and requires the action of a [force] such as [friction].  When you push the book and it responds by traveling at constant speed (rather than accelerating), you must realize that constant speed implies no [net|net force] [force] and search for another force acting opposite to your push (friction again).