Newton’s First Law In Spacetime Terms Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: 388):

Newton’s first law … states that the motion of a particle, upon which no forces act, must be uniform and in a straight line. This is called an inertial motion. In spacetime terms, the motion (i.e. ‘history’) of any particle, whether in inertial motion or not, is represented by a curve, called the world line of the particle.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the equation of motion with history confuses process with time. This confusion lies behind the misconstrual of the curvature of trajectories (geodesics) as the curvature of spacetime, in the General Theory of Relativity.