Card C00145

RBF DEFINITIONS
Action-reaction-resultant:

"Engineers have been proud of pointing out that the difference
between engineers and lay society is that engineers know that
every action has its reaction and that lay society thinks only
of the actions. Before the speed of light was measured, light
seemed, to all humanity, to be instantaneous. Since we now
know experientially that neither light nor any other phenomenon
is instantaneous, we may conclude that an action and the
vectors it creates are neither simultaneously occurring nor
instantaneous. Because vectors have discrete length, whose
dimension represents the energy mass multiplied by its
velocity, every action vector has two terminals-- a "begin-
ning' and an 'ending at the end of its noninstantaneous
action. The beginnings and the endings are nonsimultaneous-
ly occurrent. Therefore the 'ending' terminal of an action's
vector occurs later than its beginning.' Therefore, every
action must have a reaction vector at its 'beginning' terminal
and a resultant vector at its 'ending' terminal. The reaction
vectors and the resultant vectors are never angled at 180
degrees to the action vectors. They are always angled precess-
ionally at angles other than 180 degrees."
Cite SYNERGETICS text at Sec. 511.22, May171