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The presence of a suspending medium does more than simply reduce the interaction energy or force by a factor 3 or 32, as might appear from Eq. (5.26)
I understand what this sentence means but I don't know why 'reduce' is used rather than 'reduces' or 'reducing'.
can you explain the reason and give me other examples like that?
The sentence can be simplified to produce the form:
"The presence does reduce..."
which changes the meaning somewhat, but not the structure. This should make it clear why "reduces" doesn't work: you can't say "The presence does reduces".
You could alternatively say:
"The presence of a suspending medium achieves more than simply reducing..."
or
"The presence of a suspending medium achieves more than simply reduction of..."
I think the fact that "achieves... reducing" sounds a little better than "does... reducing" indicates that the mind treats "does reduce" as a compound verb despite the presence of intervening words, whereas it treats "achieves" as a standalone verb, which takes a gerund or noun as a direct object.
By contrast, in "He does more than he tells people", "does" does not act as an auxiliary, but as a standalone verb. Thus, the subject needs to be repeated before the second verb, and the verb is in the third person singular.
The presence of a suspending medium does [more than simply reduce the interaction energy or force by a factor 3 or 32, as might appear from Eq. (5.26)].
The syntax requires reduce to be in the plain (infinitival) form. More is the head and than simply reduce the interaction energy or force ... its complement.
