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An Indian "scientist" who is called Ajay Sharma, allegedly found proof that Newton's Third Law of motion isn't applicable to every situation, and therefore it's declared false, or at least it's in a need of reconstruction. The author alleges that the law fails to account for bodies of different shapes and sizes. He also conducts various experiments, that supposedly collaborate his points.

His paper explaining his reasoning in detail can be read here

Moreover, the author argues in another paper that there are discrepancies in variation of mass with velocity formulas.

What are the errors made by the author, given that the premise is false?

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    He certainly hits the word count: after grandly castigating Newton for not using proper units or citing experimental results it's time to embark on "refutations" based on material properties which are backed up by "There are many experiments justify this deduction." but fail to cite any. And compelling logic abounds: "The familiar examples of Third Law of Motion is walking and swimming, person also moves possessing kinetic energy. But a person can walk neither only on rough surface not on ice. Further a person can only swim in water tank, ..." Jul 2, 2022 at 22:05
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    How can it be disproven? You need to provide a summary of the claims as people shouldn't need to read multiple papers to understand the question
    – Joe W
    Jul 2, 2022 at 22:14
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    No doi, not a proper science paper. I do not think this counts as a notable claim.
    – User65535
    Jul 2, 2022 at 22:38
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    "The author alleges that the law fails to account for bodies of different shapes and sizes." Exactly. That was the main feature of Newton's laws, that motion, gravitation, etc. could all be explained using the same mathematical relationships regardless of size or shape, and as a result every object could be considered as a single point in space; only its mass, velocity, and position were relevant. Will his next paper be about how Einstein mistakenly forgot to account for the fact that time is uniform and constant everywhere? Jul 3, 2022 at 0:58
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    @User65535: Most of our notable claims don't have DOIs, but this one does: DOI: 10.17485/ijst/2017/v10i34/115866
    – Oddthinking
    Jul 3, 2022 at 9:33

1 Answer 1

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He makes the claim that Newton's Third Law is only true in the limited case of elastic collisions, giving as counter examples inelastic collisions (ball of chewing gum deforms and sticks to wall) and destructive collisions (heavy ball tears through sheet of paper). In this he seems to be focused on kinetic energy and overlooks what Newton actually claimed:

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts

So what happens to the kinetic energy is not considered - it may be converted into potential energy (spring compression in rubber ball, converting back to kinetic energy through the subsequent opposed forces as the ball rebounds) or simply to heat as bonds shift in the chewing gum. And it only concerns the mutual actions: to the extent that the sheet of paper impeded the motion of the ball it exerted a reactive force upon it.

He also oddly cites super-elastic collisions as a counter-example, e.g. ball hits a sheet of explosive and flies freakishly high, while overlooking that Newton is describing the physics of motion of a pair of colliding bodies: adding external forces (be they chemical, electromagnetic, or whatever) just means that you're not analyzing a Newtonian interaction.

The paper also shows some lack of editing, such as numbered paragraphs out of order (page 15 + 16) and repeated sentences, which although far from fatal flaws in themselves, suggest a lack of review.

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    You may be completely correct, but why should we trust you, an Internet random, over a published academic? You need references.
    – Oddthinking
    Jul 3, 2022 at 9:45

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