Successive scientific explanations are occasionally dissimilar in the way they explain their predictions, even in the domain where the predictions themselves are similar or identical. For instance, Einstein’s explanation of planetary motion does not merely correct Newton’s: it is radically different, denying, among many other things, the very existence of central elements of Newton’s explanation, such as the gravitational force and the uniformly flowing time with respect to which Newton defined motion. Likewise the astronomer Johannes Kepler’s theory which said that the planets move in
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