Re: The rope

pglpm il 25/05/2025 17:39:45 ha scritto:

In any case, this is all your interpretation and not that of Newton who
writes: "[the rope] will impede the progress of the stone as much as it
will promote the progress of the horse".

>
Newton is implicitly assuming a massless rope; this was a common assumption
then (see e.g. Dugas, "A history of mechanics"), just as it is today, in
this kind of problems. For a massless rope his statement is true, since the
gravitational force on the rope is then zero.

His statement is not true because gravity (which acts *vertically*) has
nothing to do with the rope which (with or without mass) acts between
the horse and the stone only *horizontally*.

Luigi Fortunati