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>>“does it reduce to Newton’s Laws under non-extreme conditions”
Thomas Kuhn said something about this in his Structures of Scientific Revolutions. <i>Imagine a set of statements, E1, E2, . . . En , which together embody the laws of relativity theory., ..... This enlarged set of statements is then manipulated to yield a new set, N1 , N2 , . . . , Nm , which is identical in form with Newton’s laws of motion, the law of gravity, and so on.
</i> <i>Yet the derivation is spurious, at least to this point. Though the N1’s are a special case of the laws of relativistic mechanics, they are not Newton’s Laws. Or at least they are not unless those laws are reinterpreted in a way that would have been impossible until after Einstein’s work. The variables and parameters that in the Einsteinian E1’s represented spatial position, time, mass, etc., still occur in the N1’s; and they there still represent Einsteinian space, time, and mass. But the physical referents of these Einsteinian concepts are by no means identical with those of the Newtonian concepts that bear the same name.</i> |