The Epistemology of Contemporary Physics: Classical Mechanics II

Taha Sochi

REVIEW 4 major objections 4 minor 22 references

The Epistemology of Contemporary Physics: Classical Mechanics II

T0 review · 4 major / 4 minor · reviewed 2026-08-12 · deepseek-v4-flash

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Pith's one-line read This paper argues that claimed violations of Newton's third law in electrodynamics, relativity, and non-inertial frames are framework-dependent and largely untested, so the law's status as a universal physical law is doubtful.

desk verdict A competent survey of known violations of Newton's third law, but its central conclusion overreaches the evidence. read the letter →

arxiv 2411.10022 v1 pith:YNNVWSID submitted 2024-11-15 physics.pop-ph physics.hist-ph

Taha Sochi This is my paper · ORCID

classification physics.pop-phphysics.hist-ph

keywords epistemologyofsciencephilosophyphysicsNewton'sthirdlawaction-reactionconservationmomentumclassicalmechanicselectrodynamicsrelativity

verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

The pith

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The reading

This paper examines claims that Newton's third law fails in electrodynamics, relativistic mechanics, non-inertial frames, and elsewhere, and asks what those claims do to the law's status. It argues that the violations are not settled facts: they depend on theoretical frameworks, personal choices, and assumptions such as rejecting action at a distance, and almost no direct experimental measurement of action and reaction forces exists. The paper concludes that if the claimed violations are real, Newton's third law should no longer be treated as a universal law, while the conservation of momentum can survive independently. The reason to care is that a central principle of classical mechanics, and its link to the most widely accepted conservation principle, is less secure than textbooks suggest.

What carries the argument

The paper's analytical engine is a pair of distinctions. First, the weak form of Newton's third law (equal and opposite forces) versus the strong form (forces also along the line joining the bodies), which tie respectively to conservation of linear and angular momentum. Second, the domain of validity of classical mechanics, taken from the companion paper, is limited to the classical macroscopic scale and inertial frames; this boundary decides whether an alleged violation is inside classical mechanics and therefore threatening, or outside and tolerable. The paper also uses the action-reaction pair between material particles as the unit that must be measured, ruling out appeals to fields or space as reaction partners within classical mechanics.

What would settle it

A laboratory experiment that directly measures the instantaneous forces on two separated, moving charged particles in an inertial frame, without relying on a theoretical accounting of field momentum, would settle the main claimed violation: if $\mathbf{F}_{12}(t) = -\mathbf{F}_{21}(t)$ at the same instant, the electrodynamic violation is refuted; if not, it is confirmed. A precision check of total momentum conservation in a closed system where the third law is claimed broken would test whether momentum conservation really survives.

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Extended reading notes

Core claim

The central claim is that Newton's third law is not equivalent to conservation of momentum and that its alleged violations cast a shadow over its status as a real physical law. The paper distinguishes the weak form of the law (equal and opposite forces) from the strong form (forces also along the line joining the particles), and argues that violations reported in electrodynamics and relativity are mostly inferred from theory, not measured. Within classical mechanics's already limited domain, such violations cannot be excused by saying the situation belongs to another theory; a physical situation governed mechanically by classical laws must respect Newton's third law. The upshot is that classical mechanics may need further restrictions on its domain, and the debate itself needs a proper conceptual and experimental framework.

Load-bearing premise

The whole classification depends on the assumption, carried over from the companion paper, that classical mechanics has a definite domain of validity bounded to the macroscopic scale and inertial frames; if that boundary is rejected or made fuzzy, then whether a given violation is inside or outside classical mechanics, and hence whether it threatens the law, becomes arbitrary.

Editorial extensions

If this is right

If the claimed violations hold, Newton's third law is at best a domain-restricted rule of thumb, not a universal law.
Conservation of linear and angular momentum must not be assumed to derive from the third law; it has independent grounding.
Classical mechanics may require further restrictions on its domain of validity beyond macroscopic scale and inertial frames.
Textbook treatments should present the third law's status as debatable and note the lack of direct experimental verification.
Alleged violations in electrodynamics inside the classical domain should be treated as problems for classical mechanics, not dismissed as another theory's business.

Reading between the lines

Editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

Editorial inference: if the paper's epistemic standard is applied elsewhere, claims of third-law violation in biological systems look premature until direct force measurements on the relevant entities exist.
Editorial inference: a decisive experiment measuring instantaneous forces on two separated charges in an inertial frame would either confirm or dissolve the electrodynamic violation, independent of field-momentum bookkeeping.
Editorial inference: the weak/strong distinction implies that angular momentum conservation could be more fragile than linear momentum conservation, since it rests on the extra alignment condition.
Editorial inference: the paper's framework suggests a testable extension, namely re-examining historical violation claims and sorting them by whether they violate the weak or strong form and by domain of validity.

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Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, and a circularity audit.

Desk Editor's Note

read the letter

This is a review essay, not a research preprint, and it reads like an extended opinion piece. The author has read the standard sources—Griffiths, Taylor, Purcell and Morin, and a bunch of older papers—and organizes the claimed violations of Newton's third law into a clear taxonomy: electrodynamics, relativity, non-inertial frames, space–object interaction, biology, and a grab-bag of others. That's genuinely useful. The distinction between the weak and strong forms (whether the forces act along the line joining the particles) is handled well, and the observation that the debate is framework-dependent and lacks direct experimental tests is accurate.

The soft spot is the conclusion. In §5 the paper says a violation of Newton's third law 'should cast a shadow on the status of this law as a real physical law.' But its own evidence shows the alleged violations depend on controversial theoretical choices (special relativity, action at a distance, whether fields count as physical objects) and that none have been directly measured. From that, the strongest conclusion is underdetermination: the debate cannot be settled with current evidence. To get from underdetermination to 'the law is actually violated' you need an extra premise—say, that the framework in which the violation appears is the correct one. The paper never supplies that premise. In fact, §4.3 explicitly conditions its seriousness categories on 'assuming their authenticity,' which undercuts the unconditional tone of the conclusion. This is a real logical gap, and it's the load-bearing part of the paper.

There are also smaller issues: the claim that violation is 'mostly accepted' is made without a survey, and the paper leans on the author's own prior work for the domain-of-validity assumptions. Those aren't fatal, but they make the argument more circular than it needs to be.

Who is this for? Someone teaching classical mechanics or writing about the philosophy of physics might find the survey useful. As a standalone paper, it needs major revision before it can support its main claim. A serious referee could help tighten the logic and make the conclusion match the evidence.

Recommendation: I'd send it to a philosophy-of-physics journal rather than a physics journal, and I'd require the author to soften the conclusion to underdetermination or actually defend the extra premise. It deserves a review rather than a desk reject, but not in its current form.

Referee Report

4 major / 4 minor

Summary. The paper investigates the epistemological status of Newton's third law (N3L) by surveying claimed violations in electrodynamics, relativistic mechanics, non-inertial frames, space-matter interaction, biology, and other settings. It argues that these alleged violations are highly dependent on adopted theoretical frameworks and are not supported by direct experimental evidence, and it discusses the law's relation to conservation of linear and angular momentum. The paper concludes that N3L's violation is mostly accepted in contemporary physics, that this should cast a shadow on the law's status as a real physical law, and that further limitations on the domain of validity of classical mechanics may be required.

Significance. The paper provides a useful and reasonably organized review of disparate claims about violations of Newton's third law, and it correctly emphasizes the framework-dependence of these claims and the scarcity of direct experimental tests. If its central argument were tightened, the paper could make a constructive contribution to the epistemology of classical mechanics by articulating the underdetermination in the action-reaction debate and by proposing concrete experimental directions. The paper does not, however, contain new derivations, machine-checked proofs, or original experimental data; its value rests on the cogency of its philosophical synthesis, which, as discussed below, is not yet fully established.

major comments (4)

[§5, second bullet] The conclusion that 'the violation of Newton's third law should cast a shadow on the status of this law as a real physical law' does not follow from the paper's own evidence. The paper repeatedly shows that the alleged violations are framework-dependent (e.g., §2.4, §4.1) and lack direct experimental verification (§4.2). From these premises the strongest supported conclusion is that the debate is underdetermined, not that the law is actually violated. To reach the shadow conclusion one must add a premise the paper does not supply—for example, that the violation-claiming frameworks are the correct ones, or that the mere existence of mainstream claims lowers the law's epistemic status. If the conclusion is intended conditionally, that condition should be stated explicitly in §5 rather than in §4.3 only.
[§3.1, point 4; §5, fourth bullet] The paper's classification of alleged violations as falling 'inside' or 'outside' the domain of validity of classical mechanics is load-bearing for its central assessment: it is used to argue that electrodynamic violations are intolerable while relativistic violations are tolerable. This classification relies entirely on the domain-of-validity criteria (classical macroscopic scale and inertial frames) imported from the author's previous paper [1], but those criteria are not defined or defended in the present manuscript. Moreover, the paper itself notes in §3.3 that the status of non-inertial-frame effects depends on whether one regards inertial forces as real, which further shows that the inside/outside boundary is not theory-neutral. The author should either state and justify the relevant domain-of-validity conditions here or explicitly frame the conclusions as conditional on the assumptions of [1].
[§5, first bullet] The paper states that 'the violation of Newton's third law is mostly (but not unanimously) accepted in contemporary physics' and treats this as a premise for its conclusions. This is an empirical claim about the scientific community, yet no survey, citation, or quantitative evidence is provided to support it. The cited references show that several authors accept or deny such violations, but they do not establish a majority view. Since this claim supports the paper's overall 'shadow' conclusion, it should be either substantiated with evidence or rephrased as a more limited observation about the specific literature reviewed.
[§2.1; §3.1 final paragraph; §5 first bullet] The paper's treatment of the conservation of momentum is internally inconsistent. In §2.1 the author argues that if the conservation of momentum is derived exclusively from Newton's third law, then a violation of N3L implies a violation of momentum conservation within the Newtonian framework. In the final paragraph of §3.1, the author concludes that accepting the electrodynamic violation 'may lose the conservation of momentum ... within classical mechanics.' Yet the first bullet of §5 asserts that the conservation of momentum 'unanimously survives' in these supposed violations. These statements cannot all be true without further qualification. The paper should specify the conditions under which momentum conservation is or is not preserved, and it should reconcile the §5 conclusion with the earlier analysis.

minor comments (4)

[Throughout] Several typographical errors occur: 'Lorenz electrodynamics' should be 'Lorentz electrodynamics' (p. 3); 'ad hence' should be 'and hence' (§2.4); 'my be rejected' should be 'may be rejected' (§3.1); 'asses' should be 'assess' (Introduction).
[§3.5] The dismissal of biological violation claims includes speculation about the motivations and competence of the authors ('made by biologists who have poor understanding of physics'). This is unnecessary and undermines the scientific tone. The substantive arguments about complexity and domain of validity are sufficient.
[§4.2] The suggestion that experiments could 'verify conclusively and decisively' the action-reaction forces 'independently of the adopted theoretical frameworks' appears in tension with the paper's own emphasis on the theory-ladenness of analysis (§4.1). The author should clarify whether any measurement can be fully independent of theoretical assumptions.
[References [1], [17]] Load-bearing premises about the domain of validity of classical mechanics and about the unsettleability of relativity disputes are cited to the author's own prior works. To make the present paper self-contained, the relevant arguments should be summarized in the text rather than referenced only.

Circularity Check

2 steps flagged · score 4.0 of 10

No derivation is circular, but the paper's severity ranking and underdetermination conclusion lean on the author's own prior work [1] and [17] for load-bearing premises.

self citation load bearing [Section 3.2 and Section 5, conclusion bullet 2]
"Newton's laws are supposedly limited by the 'scale' factor (related to speed) to the classical domain (see [1]) and hence any supposed failure of Newton's third law in relativistic mechanics should not be a problem ... what is significant, or more significant, of such violations is the violation within classical mechanics due to the limited validity of Newton's laws to the validity domain of classical mechanics, i.e. classical macroscopic scale and inertial frames of reference."

The paper's central classification of which claimed violations matter, and therefore its conclusion that Newton's third law is 'shadowed' as a real law, depends on a domain-of-validity boundary for classical mechanics. That boundary is not derived or defended in this paper; it is imported from the author's own prior paper [1] by repeated 'see [1]' references. Since [1] is by the same author and is not independently verified or argued here, the load-bearing premise of the assessment rests on self-citation rather than on an external, established result.
self citation load bearing [Section 3.2, page 17]
"all these claimed violations and their challenges are based on their own theoretical frameworks which depend primarily on personal choices and preferences, and hence it is virtually useless to try to prove or disprove any one of these claims or their challenges in an absolute sense and meaningful manner (refer to § 2.2 of [17] for more details)."

The paper's underdetermination claim, used to dismiss disputes about violations as depending on personal preferences, is supported by a citation to the author's own book [17] rather than by an argument presented in this paper. This is a supporting self-citation, not the main load-bearing step, but it reinforces the paper's stance that debates cannot be settled, and it does so by referring to the author's prior work rather than to an independent source.

full rationale

This paper contains no mathematical derivation, no fitted parameters, and no quantity that is predicted from data; its content is a literature review and epistemological assessment of claimed violations of Newton's third law. Accordingly, the classic circularity patterns involving equations reducing to their inputs do not occur. The main circularity-adjacent feature is that the paper repeatedly imports the domain of validity of classical mechanics from the author's own earlier paper [1], and this boundary is load-bearing for the conclusion that violations inside classical mechanics are significant while violations in relativistic mechanics are not. Similarly, the claim that disputes cannot be settled is referred to the author's own book [17]. These are self-citations that carry some weight, but the paper's central observation that the violation debate depends on theoretical frameworks and lacks decisive experimental evidence is supported by the quoted mainstream sources and by the paper's own analysis of examples such as the two-charge system. Thus the central claim still has independent content and the paper is not circular in the strict sense of deriving its conclusion from itself; the score reflects the load-bearing reliance on the author's prior framework.

Assumptions & free parameters 0 free parameters · 4 assumptions · 0 invented entities

The paper's central assessment rests on several unproved background assumptions, mostly imported from the author's prior paper [1] and from textbook presentations: a sharply bounded domain of validity for classical mechanics, a particle-only ontology for Newtonian forces, and the superior security of momentum conservation. There are no free parameters or invented entities because the paper introduces no model, fit, or new physical object; the 'mass of field' idea discussed in §3.1 is attributed to other authors and is not adopted.

assumptions (4)

domain assumption Classical mechanics is valid only at classical macroscopic scale and in inertial frames of reference.
Invoked throughout (§1, §2.2, §5) to classify alleged violations as inside or outside classical mechanics; the boundary is imported from the author's prior paper [1] and not re-derived.
domain assumption Newtonian mechanics is a theory of material particles, not of fields; fields have no mass in a classical sense.
Used in §3.1 to reject field-momentum and field-mass rescue strategies; this ontology is asserted, not argued.
domain assumption Conservation of linear and angular momentum is a fundamental law of all physics and is more secure than Newton's third law.
Stated in §2.1 and used in §3.6 to judge which reconciliation strategies are acceptable; treated as consensus without independent justification in this paper.
domain assumption Special relativity's relativity of simultaneity and finite signal speed correctly describe the relevant relativistic regimes.
Used in §2.4 and §3.2 to explain why violations are claimed in relativistic mechanics; the paper relies on these as mainstream doctrines without defending them.

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Cite this review

Pith. "Pith review of The Epistemology of Contemporary Physics: Classical Mechanics II." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/YNNVWSID

@misc{pith2026241110022,
  author       = {Pith},
  title        = {Pith review of: The Epistemology of Contemporary Physics: Classical Mechanics II},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/YNNVWSID}},
  note         = {Machine review of arXiv:2411.10022}
}

read the original abstract

In this paper of "The Epistemology of Contemporary Physics" series we investigate Newton's third law and discuss and analyze its epistemological significance from some aspects with special attention to its relation to the principle of conservation of linear and angular momentum. The main issue in this investigation is the potential violations of this law according to the claims made in the literature of mainstream physics. This issue may cast a shadow on the validity of classical mechanics, and its Newtonian formulation in particular, formally and epistemologically and could have important implications and consequences on contemporary physics in general. However, what is more important about this issue from our perspective is the lack of clarity, comprehensibility and coherence in the investigation and analysis of this issue and its implications marked by the absence of appropriate conceptual and epistemological frameworks to deal with this issue properly and systematically. As a result, what we find in the literature is a collection of contradicting views which are mostly based on personal choices and preferences and selective or biased theoretical analysis with the lack of proper experimental verification and substantiation.

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Reference graph

Works this paper leans on

22 extracted references · 22 canonical work pages

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.27002851.v1

doi

Pith tools

Reviewed August 12, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.

[1] [1]

T. Sochi. The Epistemology of Contemporary Physics: Classical Mechanics I. arXiv:2411.08047, 2024

work page Pith review arXiv 2024

[2] [2]

Taylor.Classical Mechanics

J.R. Taylor.Classical Mechanics. University Science Books, first edition, 2005

work page 2005

[3] [3]

Cornille

P. Cornille. Review of the application of Newton’s third law in physics.Progress in Energy and Combustion Science, 25(2):161–210, 1999

work page 1999

[4] [4]

Poincare.Science and Hypothesis

H. Poincare.Science and Hypothesis. The Walter Scott Publishing Co., first (English translation) edition, 1905

work page 1905

[5] [5]

French.Special Relativity

A.P. French.Special Relativity. W.W. Norton & Company, first edition, 1968

work page 1968

[6] [6]

Griffiths

D.J. Griffiths. Introduction to Electrodynamics. Pearson Education, fourth edition, 2013

work page 2013

[7] [7]

Cornille

P. Cornille. The Lorentz force and Newton’s third principle.Canadian Journal of Physics, 73(9-10):619–625, 1995

work page 1995

[8] [8]

S.B.L. Mathur. XIII. Biot-Savart Law and Newton’s Third Law of motion. The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science , 32(211):171–176, 1941

work page 1941