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P h p EdUC ll(1992) PnnledinlheUK
Newton’s third law revisited
C Hellingman
The orlglnal fwmulathm of Newton’s third law Is
again under altack. Too many physidsts-and not
just undergraduates-fall to understand its core.
An explanation for HIIS peculiar atate of affairs Is
attempted and a retormulatlon proposed.
In a special issue of the International Journal o{
Science Teaching on the history and philosophy of
science, Steinberg, Brown and Clement take up the
topic of the persistent misconceptions of the idea
of force (Steinberg el a1 1990).
They are certainly not the first to d o this,
but their approach is a relatively new one. They
compare the outcome of today’s research among
students to the findings of research into Newton’s
own beliefs concerning the concept of force, and
discuss
the extent to which Newton’s thinking was
hampered by similar inappropriate conceptions,
and the extent to which he had to struggle to
free himself from them. . . . Bringing the details
to light may yield insights that can benefit the
design of instruction.
The issue
In an earlier article I have argued that there is
more to the problem concerning the concept o f .
force than merely the design of instruction, and I
am not the first to notice this (Hellingman 1989).
We face the undeniable fact, hard as it is to believe,
that not only students but also professionalphysi-
cists to quite a large extent do not have a full
undersfanding of the concept of force. It would be
worthwhile to do research among professional
physicists instead of among students. I had the
Comells Heillnpman is a stall member 01 Clto (hationa
nstltJtetor Edxatlona Measurement The Nelherlands)
ana also a pnysics teacner In a Dutch secondary
school de holds an MSc In Physics and In the
Phi osophyofSc ences His research merests incILoe
ea-cat onal philosophy
ml,9,io92,0,,,~-~.csMMc14~
>?P L I-rp.IC
opportunity to do some myself recently, the results
of which are reported below. 1 also attempt
to account for some common misconceptions
harboured by professional physicists as well as
students, a situation which will probably last as
long as we stick to the original formulation of the
third law:
To every action there is always opposed an
equal reaction.
I will confine myself to the case of classical
mechanics, avoiding the complications of electro-
magnetism.
The prasent state of affairs
In October 1990 I was invited to give a lecture on
the subject mentioned to an audience of about 130
Belgian teachers of science. At the outset I asked
them to answer the following question in writing:
Newton’s third law speaks about ‘action’ and
‘reaction’. Imagine a bottle of wine standing on
a table. If the gravitational force that attracts
the bottle is called the action, what force is the
reaction to this force according to Newton’s
third law?
(This is virtually the same question Terry and
Jones (1986) asked 16-year-oldstudents.)
Professor Herreman, who invited me, and I
found 93 false answers. The answer most fre-
quently given was: ‘The normal force the table
exerts on the bottle’, a mistake I am sure I too
would have made early in my career:The reader is
invited to ask the same question of any physicist
he or she knows, The ‘inappropriate conception’
(as Steinberg et a1 call it) here at stake is the same
as in Newton’s time: action and reaction are
conceived as separate agents instead of as two
sides of one interaction. Since they are conceived
this way and since there are always two interacting
bodies in producing a force, the suggestion of an
action belonging to one body and a reaction
belonging to another is virtually inescapable.
Hence the ‘persistence of force as a property’ as
Steinberg et a1 describe the state of affairs.
 For another striking example we may turn to an
article on a special sort of gyroscope in the
Periodical Electronics and Wireless World (Aspden
1989). In this article the author states:
Thanks to the development of a force-precessed
offset gyroscope machine it is now established
that Newton’s law ofaction and reaction balance
stands disproved.
In the beginning of his remarkable article the
author says:
Traditionally we have come to accept that action
must be balanced by an equal and opposite
reaction. It is true that material bodies are
caused to move by out-of-balance forces, but
they then accelerate and there really is a halancc
force represented by inertial reaction.
These statements call for some comments. The first
sentence shows that the author doesn’t understand
Newton’s third law, which neither states nor im-
plies that an action ‘must he balanced by an equal
and opposite reaction’. On the contrary, the law
implies that an action cannot be balanced by a
reaction since action and reaction act on different
bodies. The misunderstanding compels the author,
in the second sentence, to seek a force that can
balance an ‘out-of-balance force’, and he then
comes up with ‘inertial reaction’, which he appears
to consider sufficiently real to perform the task,
whereas textbooks tell us that inertial forces are
virtual.
After this the author presents the new machine:
What now has emerged on the technological
scene is a machine that can produce that out-of-
balance force without accelerating. This means
that it can, wholly or partially, offset the force
of gravitation and so defy the acceleration
effectsof gravitation.
In the article no attention is paid to the remarkable
consequence of the supposed violation of Newton’s
third law: the inevitable violation of the law of
conservation of momentum. In the author’s view
the centre of mass of the system of machine and
earth must accelerate without any force acting on
the system from without, a trick till now only
accomplished by the famous Baron von Miinch-
hausen. Instead of paying attention to this conse-
quence, the author confronts us with a compli-
cated theoretical explanation of the phenomenon
he describes. For readers who don’t understand
(I am one of them), the author adds, without
supplying any quantitative datum, that
the fact that the machine develops a sustained
lift force in defiance of Newton’s third law is
indisputable, owing to the placement of the
demonstration machine on a balance with a
knife edge support and the use of counter-
weights.
Now quite apart from whether we believe in this
Baron von Munchhausen magic or not, the
measurement here reported does not prove the case
empirically. For if the author believes that the
gravitational force on his machine and its reaction
force are separate, non-balancing forces, he must
believe that his balance-with-knife-edge-support
only can measure the gravitational force on the
machine. How then did he measure the reaction
force, i.e. the force that the machine exerts on the
Earth, and is said to be different? If this piece of
magic ever becomes an established truth, the only
thing proved is that gravitational inferaction has
been diminished, leaving the third law as valid as
ever.
This example once again exhibits the difficulty
of abandoning the idea of ‘force as a property’.
We may well ask how many more physicists are
researching the validity of the third law, based on
its misinterpretation. Those who do might just as
well research the question, in chemistry, whether
particle B is bound to particle A, given the fact
that particle A is hound to particle B.
For a last example we may turn to our text-
books, where the idea of force as a property is
reflected in the way situations are described where
forces are at work. For instance in the case of
colliding bodies we learn about ‘the forces two
bodies exert on each other’. This formulation of
course entails a strong suggestion of two forces,
each belonging to ‘its’ body.
Historlcai perspective
Going hack into history may provide an expla-
nation of this deplorable state of affairs, and even
a way out.
Turning to the Principia we face the striking fact
that in Newton’s formulation of the third law the
word ’force’ does not appear. Why describe the
most central quality of the concept of force with-
out mentioning the concept’s name?
Newton probably had his reasons. For him the
word force had more than one connotation. As
Steinberg et alpoint out:
What Newton called ‘the force of a body’ is the
intuition that a moving body is a reservoir of
force.
This is one of the connotations: the ‘innate’ or
‘inherent’ force. A second one is called the
‘impressed force’. For Newton this was the work-
113
ing agent when bodies collide or when they are in
gravitational interaction. Hence, to avoid amhi-
guity he avoided the term. Instead he used the
shortest description of the ‘impressed force’: the
word acrion. As he described it:
This force consists truly in the action only, nor
does it remain in the body after the action.7
From this and from the examples he gives to
illustrate his third law it is clear that Newton had
only, or at least specifically, aynamical situations
in mind when he used the terms ‘action’ and
‘reaction’. At any rate it is probable that he
wanted to exclude the ‘innate force’. The import-
ant thing for our case, however, is that he had not
demonstrably freed himself from the notion that
force, taken in whatever sense he had in mind,
always belongs to or refers to one single body,
which means: force as a property. As we all know,
Newton’s four laws of motion, together with his
calculus, in subsequent times became the foun-
dations of the huge and powerful building of
mechanics as a formal mathematical system.
Countless numbers of problems in dynamics as
well as statics found their solution through appli-
cation of the first and second laws, a few additional
concepts and vectorcalculus. In celestial mechanics
the fourth law proved an indispensable and most
powerful tool. Calculations toa hitherto unknown
degree of accuracy proved possible. What was the
role of the third law in this gigantic development?
Every student of mechanics knows that it
appears on the scene only rarely. Few questions
allow for a direct application; the ones that do,
in textbooks, have usually been constructed especi-
ally for that purpose. There is, of course, one very
important exception: the derivation of the law of
conservation of momenrum, pre-eminently the
indispensable tool in all problems of collision.
Here lies the importance of the third law; for the
rest it stays more or less behind the scene.
Furthermore there was a change in the status of
the law. In the development of the system of
mechanics ‘action’ and ‘reaction’ were considered
as synonymous for ‘force’ in general, giving rise to
the well known statement that forces ‘always occur
in pairs’. But the consequences of this point of
view were Drobably never worked out; were, at any
rate, not widely understood, probably because the
law was only rarely applied as mentioned above.
The consequences were twofold (i) the law func-
tions more or less as a deJinition or description of
tNote that Newton used the word ‘action’ in two
different meanings; (i) to designate a force and (ii) to
describe something that happens.
114
the concept of force. It expresses the most central
quality of a force: the necessity of its having a
counterpart, or, stated otherwise: the impossibility
of its isolated existence. And as a result of this:
(ii) there is no room for such a concept as ‘inertial
force’. For inertia has no counterpart.
If these consequences had been thought through,
I think that one would have noticed much earlier
that the formulation of the third law is inappropri-
ate. For this I see three reasons.
(i) The terms ‘action’ and ‘reaction’ are very
inappropriate and bound to give rise to misunder-
standing. For a full account of this point of view
I refer to my earlier article (Hellingman 1989).
(ii) If we stick to these terms we must know that
action and reaction are related in the way the two
ends of a rope are. It is even more to the point to
conipare a pulling force with a piece of a stretched
elastic band, fixed to an object. It is impossible to
imagine that there would be no other end, fixed to
or held by another object, and that this object
would not experience the same force in the oppo-
site direction. The elastic hand is the interacting
agent pulling the objects to each other; one two-
sided agent, acting in between the two objects.
There is, however, nothing in the formulation of
the third law that expresses any relationship what-
soever between actionand reaction. The law simply
states that for every action rhere is a reaction
(equal and opposite), hut doesn’t give a single clue
as to how the two might cohere. No wonder then
that for many students (and physicists alike) any
force, equal and opposite to another force, can
stand for a ‘reaction’, whilst at the same time for
some researchers the very existence of a reaction
force is a puzzle to he solved for any new situation.
(iii) For the third reason I turn to . . . Newton.
In the end of the third book of the Principia
we find the following passage, wherein Newton
explains why the forces celestial bodies exert on
each other are proportional to the masses of both
bodies. In Cajori’s (1966) translation:
For all action is mutual, and makes the bodies
approach one to the other, and therefore must
be the same in both bodies. It is true that we
may consider one body as attracting, another as
attracted; but this distinction is more mathe-
matical than natural. . . . It is not one action by
which the Sun attracts Jupiter, and another by
which Jupiter attracts the Sun; hut it is one
action by which the Sun and Jupiter mutually
endeavour to come nearer together (by the third
Law of Motion); and by the action with which
Jupiter attracts the Sun. Likewise Jupiter and
the Sun endeavour to come nearer together. But
the Sun is not attracted towards Jupiter by a
 twofold action, nor Jupiter by a twofold action
towards the Sun; but it is one single inter-
mediate action, by which both approach nearer
together.
One single intermediate action! One can almost
hear the word interaction, much in use nowadays.
Interpreting forces as sides of a single inter-
action implies a very important shift of focus of
attention. The attention is drawn away from the
objects themselves to ‘somewhere’ between the
objects. Failure to see the ‘between’-like character
of a force lies at the bottom of all misconceptions.
Conclusions
Instead of paying attention to students’ miscon-
ceptions we ought to look to the professional
physicists, including ourselves: when shall we get
rid of our misconceptions? In my view this will not
take place until we have managed to adopt consis-
tently and systematically the shift of view des-
cribed before. As I hope to have made clear this is
virtually impossible as long as we maintain the
third law in its original formulation. Hence my
proposal for a new formulation:
A force is one side of an interaction; the inter-
action takes place between Iwo bodies, working
equally strongly in the two opposite directions.
(Nearly the same proposal was made in my first
article, but there the words ‘one side of‘ were
missing. So, although that formulation stressed
the ’hetween’-like character indeed, it suffered
from a serious handicap. It did not cover the usual
connotation of the word ‘force’, namely its one-
sidedness or one-directional character.)
As I stated in my first article the meaning of the
concept is not really changed. From a logical,
objective point of view the only change is in
looking at the same phenomenon from a different
angle. Newton’s original explicatory examples can
be maintained as well as most explanations in
textbooks.
However, from the subjective point of view of
any reader it may come as a shock-the quite
natural shock anyone experiences when a very
familiar, seemingly fixed point of view is under
attack. It is the shock Redeker (1985) describes as
a re-forging, a n umlernen. On this issue he writes:
On the other hand, it happens that from the
point of physics a radical new interpretation
takes place to such a degree that what is con-
ceptualized in a concept from physics is never to
be found in experience, and further the sense of
such a concept always contradicts what the
experience of daily life teaches.
Doubtlessly Redeker is pushing his point loo far.
But the struggle about the concept of force seems
an exquisite example of the truth that is contained
in his words.
Acknowledgments
I wish to express my to professor
D~ w H~~~~~~~of the university ofKortrijk and
to professor D~ D B & of~the ~university ~ of
Leiden for their help and encouraging comments;
-
and also to my colleaeue J~~ Hondebrink for
sending me the important passage of Newton’s
text.
References
Aspden H 1989 Anti-gravityelectronics Elecrron. &
Wireless World 95 29-3 I
Cajori F 1966 Sir Isooc Newlon’s Marhemalicol
Principles (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press) DD 568-9
Hellingk; C 1989 Do forces have twin brothers?
Phys. Educ. 24 36-40
Redeker B 1985 The difference between the lifeworld of
children and the world of physics; a basic problem
for teaching and learning mechanics. The Many Faces
of Teaching and Learning Mechanics: Proc. GIREP
CO$ (1984) ed P L Lijnse (WCC: Utrecht) p 90
Steinberg M S, Brown D E and Clement J 1990 Genius
is not immune to persistent misconceptions Inr. J.
Sei. Educ. 12 265-73
Terry C and Jones G 1986 Newton’s third law and
conceptual change Eur. J . Sci. Edur. 8 291-8
115