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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2005 56(1):179-188; doi:10.1093/phisci/axi110
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© The Author (2005). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of British Society for the Philosophy of Science. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org

Evens and Odds in Newtonian Collision Mechanics

Leonard Angel

Philosophy & Humanities Department, Douglas College, New Westminster, BC, Canada, Leonard_Angel{at}douglas.bc.ca

Pérez Laraudogoitia ([2003]) proposes that self-excitations can prevent non-contact interactions in Newtonian collision mechanics. The proposal is weakened by the apparent arbitrariness of what will be shown as the requirement of only an odd number of sets of some ex nihilo-created self-exciting particles. There is, however, an initial condition such that, without the ex nihilo self-exciting particles, either there is a contradictory outcome, or there is a non-contact configuration law, or there are odds versus evens indeterminacies. With the various odds versus evens arbitrarinesses and other such difficulties, there seems to be an ontological unsatisfactoriness in the speed-unbounded Newtonian collision system.

  1. Introduction
  2. Taking self-excitations very seriously
  3. A problematic initial condition
  4. Another alternative


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