When Newton's Laws Were Held In Esteem
In today's world, classical mechanics is a stepping stone, a simplified version that is not perceived as a fundamental description of the reality we live in. If something disagrees with Newton's Laws, it is not thought to be because of a lack of full understanding, but rather it is concluded to be because Newton's Laws are wrong.
As a result, quantum mechanics, general relativity, and the Big Bang models have become standard models to describe the universe. Classical mechanics has fallen largely into the pages of the history books. No where to be seen are the scientists who are searching for the connections between new observations of the cosmos and Newton's Laws.
It was not always this way. As Richard Feynman discusses here, anomalies that did not match the predictions made by Newton's Laws were critically analyzed for what we could be missing that would make Newton's Laws recognizably produce the observations. In the case of the moons of Jupiter, it appeared that the predictions were distinctly not in line with the observations.
Rather than developing an entirely new way of looking at the universe, those considering this anomaly held Newton's Laws in esteem and set about trying to recognize what critical missing link was unknown that was not enabling predictions to match the observations.
As Richard Feynman states:
"...Mr. Rømer, having confidence in the law of gravitation came to an interesting conclusion; that it takes light some time to travel from the moons (of Jupiter) to the Earth, and that what we're looking at when we see the moons are not how they are now but how they were the time ago that it took the light to get here. ...And by the fact that they were this much too early or that much too late, was able to determine the velocity of light. This was the first demonstration that light was not an instantaneously propagating material. I bring this particular matter to your attention because it illustrates something: that when a law is right it can be used to find another one. That by having confidence in this law, if something is the matter, it suggests perhaps some other phenomenon. And if we had not known the law of gravitation, we would have taken much longer to find the speed of light because we would not have known what to expect of Jupiter's satellites. This process has developed into an avalanche of discoveries, each new discovery permits the tools for much more discovery, and this is the beginning of that avalanche which has gone on for four hundred years in a continuous process and we're still avalanching along at high speed at this time."
Nowadays, this confidence in Newton's laws is non-existent in the search for understanding the universe. This is evidenced by the lack of any theoretical or experimental research at the academic level into how Newton's laws apply to newly made observations. General relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Big Bang are the only fields of research considered of any value. This does not mean that any have anything to do with reality, however.
Rather than holding confidence in Newton's Laws, which are based firmly in natural philosophy, we have stepped away from philosophy and began a rigorous process of attempting to explain observations through complex mathematical equations that have nothing to do with classical mechanics.
This method does not appreciate the value of Newton's Laws.
In much the same way as how the speed of light was recognized to not be instantaneous by holding confidence in the law of gravity, so too can the so-called fundamental force of electromagnetism be better understood by holding confidence in the laws of classical mechanics.
When logic and careful thought is replaced by jumping to conclusions and disregard for the universality of classical mechanics, anything can be claimed to explain the universe. But only when logic is held as a hinge, and classical mechanics as a beacon, can we deduce the fundamentals of reality as they truly are.