What is Vital Force

http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/~bill/teaching/philbio/vitalism.htm

C.G. Hempel, by contrast, insists that the fault with vitalism is not that it posits entities which cannot be observed, but that such explanations ‘render all statements about entelechies inaccessible to empirical test and thus devoid of empirical meaning’ because no methods of test, however indirect, are provided

This ia my point of view.

well now you quote c j hempel...quote many others too...but the basic thing is that science is study of phenomenon and no speculation only....it is occurring  why? how?and all the questions are to found out and then many things remain unanswered but phenomenon does not stop....sun will rise,,rivers will flow,,energy will be there whether it could be measured today or tomorrow or never...

AlexS wrote:

             < Phenomenological Theory. A theory which expresses mathematically the results of observed phenomena without paying detailed attention to their fundamental significance. >

                Newton once said : "I do not invent hypotheses" and "I shall not mix conjectures with reliability" >
 
            Indeed, Newton did not invent the gravitational constant G and sadly, it turned out to be a mere inspired Phenomenological Theory, the way you aptly defined it.

   For a hypothesis to be put forward as a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. Scientists generally base scientific hypotheses on previous observations that cannot be satisfactorily explained with the available scientific theories. Even though the words "hypothesis" and "theory" are often used synonymously in common and informal usage, a scientific hypothesis is not the same as a scientific theory  


       The tale is told that Sir Issac Newton was snoozing under an apple tree when a fruit fell on his head to startle him from slumber. Newton's knock on his noggin inspired his Theory of Gravitation. Issac's own rude awakening made him the founding father of our modern mechanistic paradigm.

                            Has it ever been proved that gravity is proportional to mass?

No!  This was an assumption that Newton made and others followed, but since nobody pretends to have actually weighed the Sun or the planets it has never been checked.  Laboratory experiments have attempted to check it for small bodies, but (a) it is impossible to separate gravitational from electrostatic effects and (b) we have not been told all the facts.  The various anomalies such as variations with temperature and with the coating on the object have not reached the text books.

   The Pioneers 10 and 11, spacecrafts deployed to explore the outer solar system, were reported to have experienced a constant anomalous acceleration toward the Sun

   Perhaps even more relevant are a few chapters in Matt Edwards' book, "Pushing Gravity".  Here you will find details of probably the only experimental tests ever to have been made that investigate the possibility of gravitational shielding.  They were performed by Quirino Majorana round about 1920.  Despite his best efforts they were inconclusive and (like Dayton Miller's work) need to be repeated, the results were compatible with a degree of "gravitational absorption" that would mean that the Sun could be about three times as massive as we currently think.
              Issac never asked the question: "Who aimed the apple at my head?" Yet Newton believed the common sense of his time: Earth is a living creature.  How did the apple get in the tree ?" What force mobilizes water and minerals to climb out of earth and assemble in orderly geometry as tree and its fruit? Why do trees grow up? Without thinking, most people insist light makes trees grow up. But even in darkness trees grow up, so phototropism doesn't effect the upthrust bud. A clue to answer this queer query is the very shape of Issac's apple, it's not really a sphere, but a donut without a hole -- the shape of a magnetic field.
              So what makes trees grow up is magnetism.  Newton's gravitational constant G changes with the orientation of test masses by at least 0.054 per cent, according to Gershteyn's experiments, a remarkable and unprecedented finding that has landed his paper on the subject in the journal Gravitation and Cosmology. "The existence of such an effect requires simply a radically new theory of gravitation, because the magnitude of this effect dwarfs any of Einstein's corrections to Newtonian gravity." Isaac Newton first described G in 1687 as a fundamental component of his universal law of gravity. Two masses, Newton said, attract one another with a force proportional to their mass that falls off rapidly as the bodies move farther and farther apart. Albert Einstein later used G in his own field equations that fine-tuned Newton's original laws.

                    The constant G puts precise limits on gravity's attractive force and appears in equations that describe any gravitational field, whether the field is between planets, stars, galaxies, microscopic particles or rays of light. Centuries of measurement have firmly fixed the value of G at 6.673 x 10 raised to the power minus 11 cubic meters per kilogram per square second.If G varies under any circumstances, scientists would have to rewrite virtually every physical law and a long-accepted feature of the Universe isotropy, or the condition that a body's physical properties are independent of its orientation in space.

``Gershteyn and his co-workers lay an extraordinary and very interesting claim which if proven true would change our view of the universe," Lev Tsimring, a research physicist with the Institute for Nonlinear Science at the University of California San Diego, told UPI.The experiment, he said, would seek to detect gravitational anisotropy the condition that the attractive force between bodies would vary with respect to their spatial orientation, not their separating distance.

        Experimental evidence that the gravitational constant varies with orientation

Authors: Mikhail L. Gershteyn (1 and 2), Lev I. Gershteyn (2), Arkady Gershteyn (2), Oleg V. Karagioz (3) ((1) Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, U.S., (2) Insight Product Co., Brighton, MA, U.S., (3) Tribotech division of National Institute of Aviation Technology, Moscow, Russia)
(Submitted on 22 Feb 2002 (v1), last revised 12 Apr 2002 (this version, v2))

    Abstract: In 1687, Isaac Newton published the universal law of gravitation stating that two bodies attract each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses and the inverse square of the distance. The constant of proportionality, G, is one of the fundamental constants of nature. As the precision of measurements increased the disparity between the values of G, gathered by different groups, surprisingly increased. This unique situation was reflected by the 1998 CODATA decision to increase the relative G uncertainty from 0.013% to 0.15 %. Our repetitive measurements of the gravitational constant (G) show that G varies significantly with the orientation of the test masses relative to the system of fixed stars, as was predicted by the Attractive Universe Theory. The distances between the test masses were in the decimeter range. We have observed that G changes with the orientation by at least 0.054%.

     Swing a bucket of water at the end of rope and centrifugal forces pull it up and away. These forces result from the combined gravitational pull of all the distant stars and planets, Austrian physicist Ernst Mach wrote. Any change in the orientation of heavenly bodies would affect forces on matter everywhere, so powerful is their combined effect. The idea that G may change with respect to the way a body is positioned relative to the rest of the universe is simply an example of Mach's adage: matter out there affects forces right here.

      In view of the latest scientific findings from outer space, does Newton's gravitational constant G hold any water ?


With regards
   Lew

AlexS wrote:

     <   In order to heal the concept if VF is redundant and confusing , but this is tradition >

                                     Mind-Body Healing

                   The holistic view of healing teaches that human beings are more than just the physical body and that emotions,thoughts,attidudes and spirituality play an essential role in healing. Rather than conform to the predominat medical view that there is one cause and one cure to disease, holism stresses that health and disease depend on a dynamic and often subtle interplay among the physical,emotional.mental and  spiritual aspects of our being, as well as our relationship to the environ­ment in which we live.

                  " Health is harmony, and harmony has no meaning without the fluid movement of interdependent parts. Like a stream that becomes stagnant when it ceases to flow, harmony and health turn into disease when stasis oc­curs. We return to the concept of the biodance, the endless streaming of the body-in-flux.During the past few years, an important new field called psycho-neuroimmunology has developed. It is concerned with identifying the links between the mind, the brain, and the immune system and deter­mining how they communicate with each other. Researchers have scientifically confirmed that our mind and feelings influence health, while our health has a powerful effect on the mind. "

                                              - Larry Dossey, M.D. Space, Time & Medicine )

                     Healing is a process, not a magical event .  Healing involves a greater experience of Oneness, Wholeness and Reconnection with all aspects of your being.The physician is merely Nature 's assistant, only Mother Nature does the healing.
               
                                                            We are what we eat
                                                            We are what we drink
                                                            We are what we breathe
                                                            We are what we think

With regards
     Lew

HAHNEMANN WANTED TO CREATE SECT....

Originally posted by Piyush Kumar HAHNEMANN WANTED TO CREATE SECT....   HAHNEMANN NEVER CREATED HOMOEOPATHY.....HE SAID PHENOMENON IS THERE AND HE WORKED OVER IT...FOR THE BENEFIT OF MANKIND....   AND YOU TALK OF PHENOMENON AND JUMP AND FALL LIKE MONKEY......SHOW TEETH AND PRETEND TO BE BENEFECTOR OF MANKIND....   YOU TALK OF SCIENCE AND KNOW NOT THE ABCD OF SCIENCE......   FIRST OF ALL BE CLEAR IN WHATEVER YOU SAY......

Your post tells a lot ....

AlexS,

Originally posted by AlexS Freud's psychoanalysis is not science . But one can easy measure libido .

Originally posted by Kaviraj He thinks himself to be clever enough. Regards, Kaviraj

He is making fun and enjoying . sajjad.