Newton’s Third Law of Motion is Incomplete, Says Indian Scientist. He Needs a Grant to Prove It

Everyone has studied Newton’s third law of motion in school. “For each and every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,” it says. According to Shimla-based researcher Ajay Sharma, the 335-year-old law can be modified as it is “incomplete”. The action may be equal, less, or more than the reaction, he claims.

Could Newton’s third law of motion be modified by an Indian scientist?

The research has been confirmed by the scientific community globally but still needs to be confirmed experimentally. For that purpose, Ajay Sharma has written to the state government to provide a fund of Rs 10 lakh to Himachal Pradesh University where he will carry out the experiments. In a missive to the state government on November 20, he said his experiments will be supervised by the university's Department of Physics Chairman, Vir Singh Rangra.

“The biggest limitation of Newton's third law is that it neglects the shape of bodies,” Sharma, who is the assistant director for education with the state government, told IANS. Sharma claims that it is justified by simple observations like a round ball falling down due to attraction of the earth and rebounding due to reaction from the floor.

However, he says a spherical ball of rubber may have different shapes like sphere, semi-sphere, triangular, cone, square, long pipe, flat and irregular shape, etc. Newton’s law has not been quantitatively confirmed for any shape but considered true for every shape. “It is not scientifically justified. This issue has been raised by me at various international fora too logically,” he says.

On the basis of preliminary experiments, the 57-year-old, whose second book Beyond Einstein And Emc2, was published by the Cambridge International Science Publishers, is confident of the law modification. On June 10, 2018, French Professor Carlo Rovello as Editor of International Journal Foundations of Physics stated that the limitation of Newton’s law can be proved with the experiments in the domain of Newtonian Mechanics.

In October 2019, VPS Awana, Director and Senior Principal Scientist of the National Physical Laboratory of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in New Delhi, suggested to Sharma that the original experiments on the third law of motion be conducted.

In July of the same year, Union Minister of Science and Technology Harsh Vardhan had sent Sharma's project to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research for funding but he's yet to receive any support to prove his research.

Ajay Sharma has devoted over 36 years of his life to research on Einstein, Newton and Archimedes. His work has been praised by domestic as well as international scientific journals. It would be a tragedy if the government didn’t support him in his endeavour that could have significant consequences regarding how we study the world around us.