Newton’s Laws of motion and universal gravitation constitute the foundation of almost all branches of science and engineering. Mostly, these are introduced at the senior levels in the schools and the students practice applying these laws to many problems. Apparently these laws look fine and without any problem. But as one rarely returns to ponder over these laws seriously at senior levels, the serious problems associated with these laws remain unnoticed. This lecture proposes a return to the Newton’s Laws of motion and universal gravitation to examine the situation. In the first part of the talk the difficulties with these laws will be discussed and some modifications will be suggested. It will be shown how the difficulties melt away and very profound consequences emerge. In the second part of the talk the modified law will be applied to a number of astrophysical and solar system mechanics problems. It will be very interesting to see how in all cases the proposed extended Newton’s laws can resolve a number of unexplained phenomena and finally results in a very profound consequence so far as the model of our universe is concerned.
Amitabha Ghosh received his Bachelor of Engineering and Master of Engineering degrees from Bengal Engineering College, Shibpur, (Calcutta University) in 1962 and 1964, respectively. He joined the Mechanical Engineering Department of this college as a Lecturer in 1965 May and continued his doctoral research finally receiving the Doctorate degree from Calcutta University in 1969. He joined IIT Kanpur in January 1971 as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical
Engineering and became Professor in 1975 June. From 1977 to 1978 he spent at the Technical University Aachen with Alexander von Humboldt Foundation senior fellowship. From 1997 to 2002 he served IIT Kharagpur as the Director and subsequently returned to his Professorial position at Kanpur where he continued up to 2006 till his retirement. After retirement from IIT
Kanpur he worked as a Senior Scientist of the Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi and Honorary Distinguished Professor at both IIT Kanpur and Bengal Engineering & Science University, Shibpur. Currently he is a Platinum Jubilee Senior Scientist of the National Academy of Sciences, India, Allahabad and also an Honorary Distinguished Professor at Bengal
Engineering & Science University, Shibpur. His research and academic interests are in Basic
Mechanics, Kinematics and Dynamics, Advanced Manufacturing and Robotics. He has guided more than 75 M Tech and 18 PhD students and published about 125 research papers.