Newtonian mechanics is a bunch of maths statements. It doesn’t predict anything at all.
The students constructed a model of the world which used Newtonian mechanics for one part of the model. That models predictions fell flat on its head. They are right to reject the model.
But the model has many parts. If they’re going to reject the model, they should reject all parts of the model, not just pick on Newtonian mechanics. There’s no such thing as gravity, or pendulum, or geometry, or anything at all. They should start from scratch!
Except that’s obviously wrong. Clearly some parts of the model are correct and some parts of the model aren’t.
So we have here a large Bayesian update that the model as a whole is incorrect, and a small Bayesian update that each individual part of the model is incorrect. The next thing to do is to make successive changes to the different parts of the model, see what they predict, and make Bayesian updates accordingly.
They will soon fine that it they model the base of the Pendulum as unattached to the ground, they will predict what happened perfectly, and so will make a large Bayesian update in favour of that being the correct model. Fortunately it still has Newtonian mechanics as one of it’s constituent assumptions.
Newtonian mechanics is a bunch of maths statements. It doesn’t predict anything at all.
The students constructed a model of the world which used Newtonian mechanics for one part of the model. That models predictions fell flat on its head. They are right to reject the model.
But the model has many parts. If they’re going to reject the model, they should reject all parts of the model, not just pick on Newtonian mechanics. There’s no such thing as gravity, or pendulum, or geometry, or anything at all. They should start from scratch!
Except that’s obviously wrong. Clearly some parts of the model are correct and some parts of the model aren’t.
So we have here a large Bayesian update that the model as a whole is incorrect, and a small Bayesian update that each individual part of the model is incorrect. The next thing to do is to make successive changes to the different parts of the model, see what they predict, and make Bayesian updates accordingly.
They will soon fine that it they model the base of the Pendulum as unattached to the ground, they will predict what happened perfectly, and so will make a large Bayesian update in favour of that being the correct model. Fortunately it still has Newtonian mechanics as one of it’s constituent assumptions.