Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Expressing a verb as a change to an attribute

By convention my "verbs" are always between an actor and a target and always leave the target (and sometimes the actor) with changed properties. So it is convenient, when an attribute A is changed by a verb, to use the notation 'dA' as a name for the verb. So we can express various things, for example the basic dynamic relationship:

Kinda fun.

Update: somehow this notation had me thinking harder about Newton's Laws of Motion. They run in parallel with truisms and basic definitions of semantics. For example the above is our form of F=m*dV and the 1st Law about bodies remaining in motion matches the 4th truism that "things remain the same". 

The conclusion I come to is that Newton was semantically constrained and his genius was in finding a vocabulary for the world that fit naturally and exactly into (pre-existing) language conventions.

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