The Third Law By Jamie Kirkpatrick

Last week, Sir Issac Newton would have celebrated his 383rd birthday. Remember Sir Isaac? He was the gentleman who, while “in a contemplative mood,” watched an apple drop from a tree and wondered why it fell straight down. That innocent observation led him to consider the existence of a universal attractive force—what we now call “gravity.”  But Sir Isaac didn’t stop contemplating there. He went on to formulate his three Laws of Motion that have become the fundamental principles of classical mechanics. His first Law (Inertia) posits that an object stays at rest or in motion unless some force acts on it. His second Law (F=ma) states that force equals mass times acceleration. But it’s Newton’s third Law (Action-Reaction) that leaves me musing today: “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” 

“I wonder,” I asked myself upon waking this morning, “what would Sir Isaac say are the equal and opposite reactions to the egregious acts we’re witnessing almost every day: the invasion of Venezuela and the middle-of-the-night extraction of its president and his wife? Or the murder of an innocent Minnesota mother—an American citizen!— by an ICE agent? Or threatening to wrest Greenland from a European ally, or even about building a gaudy $400 million ballroom while many of us struggle to make ends meet? What would he say? What do you say?

I’ve come to the conclusion that the Trump administration does not believe Newton’s third Law—or any other law, for that matter— has any applicability to its actions. They do what they do with presumed impunity. I keep waiting for either one of the so-called co-equal branches of our government—the Legislative or the Judicial—to react and rein in the Executive, but it seems that the President and his minions have moved beyond what was enshrined in the Constitution into an unimaginable realm of lawlessness and immorality, of coverup and spin.

When a bird flies, its wings push air downwards as an action force and the air pushes the bird upward as reaction force. Or when a ball hits the ground, it applies a force on the ground and the ground responds with a reaction force causing the ball to bounce back. Even to a non-physicist such as yours truly, this makes a certain amount of sense. What doesn’t make sense, however, is how Newton’s third Law does not appear to  apply to any of the people in the Trump White House or to their enablers in Congress and on the Supreme Court. There is never a reaction.

No doubt, some of you will disagree with me on this. I will assume that disagreement is founded on the political applicability of Newton’s Third Law, not on its foundation in Physics. But could we at least agree that actions do have consequences—either equal and opposite as science dictates, or the moral and ethical ones that exist in the metaphysical universe? Personally, I believe that those laws—the laws of karma—are as immutable as Newton’s and will ultimately hold the current culprits accountable.

And then there’s this: I had lunch with a friend the other day and asked him what he thought of all that was going on in Newton’s physical world. He said, “It’s just wag the dog—anything to shift the focus off Epstein.”  

Maybe Sir Isaac needs to contemplate a fourth Law: the Law of Accountability.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives on both sides of the Chesapeake Bay. His editorials and reviews have appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. His most recent novel, “The Tales of Bismuth; Dispatches from Palestine, 1945-1948” explores the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is available on Amazon and in local bookstores. His newest novel, “The People Game,” is scheduled for publication in February, 2026. (It’s available for pre-order now on Amazon.) His website is musingjamie.net.