Dr. Ruby Dunlap’s Uganda Fulbright Blog
“Newtonian mechanics is satisfactory,” says Polkinghorne, “for largish objects moving at ten miles an hour, unsatisfactory for the same objects moving at a hundred thousand miles a second.” “Kuhn dismisses as an irrelevancy the well-known fact that Newtonian mechanics is the slow-moving limit of Einstein’s mechanics. Yet to physicists this relationship would seem to be important, for it explains why classical mechanics was so long an adequate theory and why it remains so for systems whose velocities are small compared with the velocity of light.” (One World The Interaction of Science and Theology, pp. 14,17)
Probably Newtonian mechanics sufficed for explaining the movements of your vehicles on ice and snow this winter in the U.S. The reports about your winter have been remarkable, especially since, while the Equator crosses southern Uganda, the elevations are high enough to make it balmy most of the time. Some days have been downright chilly, a few hot in the afternoons. Mornings in paradise are almost always perfect mornings of comfortably cool freshness. And the look from our “tree house” apartment is always one of lush rain forest. Here is a photo from the family home in Ohio where I spent my teen years and one from where we are living now to show the difference this winter. We also see monkeys in the trees around our house, unlikely in either Ohio or Tennessee.
