To my knowledge, Nikolay Noskov was the first to appreciate, in the 1990s, that Weber’s dynamics was so far the only one that allowed for a physical account of the shape of the ellipses, even if it did not pretend to give a «mechanical explanation» for them. In this respect, Noskov particularly insisted on associating the retarded potentials with longitudinal vibrations of the moving bodies in order to give a content to the conservation, merely formal in Weber, of energy; he also insisted that their occurrence permeated all types of natural phenomena, from the stability of atoms and their nuclei, to orbital elliptical motion, sound, light, electromagnetism, the flow of water or gusts of wind [9].
Continuar leyendo «The apple and the Dragon»