Hooke's Law - no duh

[MikeS]

@Chronos

Actually, the law that Ohm came up with is about the relationship between the temperature of an object and its resistance. The familiar V = IR is just the definition of resistance, and the observation that resistance so calculated is often a constant (or close enough to it) is interesting, but doesn’t apply anywhere where Ohm’s actual law is relevant.

Interesting — I didn’t know the history of it at all.
Certainly the current usage of “Ohm’s Law” has changed/broadened, but it makes more sense that the original form would actually be worthy of being called a “law”.

[billfish678]

@Flywheel

…one-handed!

They had porn back then?

[Malacandra]

@CC

Right - so what’s the big deal about it? I can’t discern an answer to my question here.

Why should the linear relationship be self-evident? I can see where it would seem obvious that the more you stretch a spring the harder it gets to stretch it - and you certainly hit a point like that with an elastic band.

[Claverhouse]

@billfish678

They had porn back then?

You really don’t want to masturbate with a hook for a hand.

[Sunscreen]

@Finagle

There are lots of things that people “knew” until someone sat down and ran some experiments. Heavy things obviously fall faster, for example. There’s no obvious reason why spring compressibility should be linear, even as a first approximation. Lots of things are exponential in nature.

Could you elaborate on the heavier objects falling faster?

[buddy431]

@Sunscreen

Could you elaborate on the heavier objects falling faster?

I think he was using it as a famous misconception: people thought heavy things fell faster than lighter things, until Galileo actually dropped some balls from the leaning tower of Pisa to prove them wrong (the actual history is maybe a little more nuanced).

There’s no reason to necessarily suspect the force of springs is linear to how much they’re stretched, and in fact, it’s not, really. But in many cases a linear fit describes the force curve pretty well over some range of motion, and it sure makes the math a lot easier.

[dunkleosteus]

@sich_hinaufwinden

Well not for a particular spring it doesn’t.

But of course it does change depending on what spring is being considered. So it’s a constant that is…variable.

As opposed to the Big G gravitational constant for eample, which doesn’t vary as far as I know.

At least that’s the kind of thing I thought **Aquadementia **was getting at.

But now that I think about it, I’m not sure what you mean about the Hubble constant. Is it the imprecision in our measurement of it, or something else?

I see the spring constant as being constant inside a spring’s frame of reference. It’s unlikely that any series of calculations using the spring constant would need it to be changed unless a different spring was being referenced.

Likewise, the Big G constant may only be valid within the laws of physics that operate within our universe. Sure, that’s essentially the entire scope of reality, but it’s not infinite. The only difference I see is our perspective. The spring constant should not change in respect to a given spring.

[ElvisL1ves]

The more obvious an invention or discovery seems in hindsight, the more significant it really is, right? It wasn’t obvious until it *was *invented or discovered.