Newton’s Third Law

Abstract

The law of action-reaction is thoroughly used in textbooks to derive the conservation laws of linear and angular momentum, and it was considered by Ernst Mach the the cornerstone of physics. We give here a background survey of several questions raised by the action-reaction law, and in particular, the role of the physical vacuum is shown to provide an appropriate framework to clarify the occurrence of possible violations of the action-reaction law. It is also obtained an expression for the general linear momentum of a body-particle in the context of statistical mechanics. It is shown that Newton's third law is not verified in systems out of equilibrium due to an additional entropic gradient term present in the particle's momentum.