Developed from a classic Notre Dame undergraduate course on the study of the motion of bodies, this volume stresses the history of science as well as the relevant physics and mathematics. Starting with ancient Greek celestial mechanics, topics include the Keplerian Revolution, displacement and kinematics, the special theory of relativity, and much more. 2013 edition.
Available for the first time in English, this two-volume course on theoretical and applied mechanics has been honed over decades by leading scientists and teachers, and is a primary teaching resource for engineering and maths students at St. Petersburg University. The course addresses classical branches of theoretical mechanics (Vol. 1), along with a wide range of advanced topics, special problems and applications (Vol. 2). This first volume of the textbook contains the parts “Kinematics” and “Dynamics”. The part “Kinematics” presents in detail the theory of curvilinear coordinates which is actively used in the part “Dynamics”, in particular, in the theory of constrained motion and variational principles in mechanics. For describing the motion of a system of particles, the notion of a Hertz representative point is used, and the notion of a tangent space is applied to investigate the motion of arbitrary mechanical systems. In the final chapters Hamilton-Jacobi theory is applied for the integration of equations of motion, and the elements of special relativity theory are presented. This textbook is aimed at students in mathematics and mechanics and at post-graduates and researchers in analytical mechanics.
1 We search the concepts and methods ) of the theory of deformable sonds from GALILEO to LAGRANGE. Neither of them achieved much in our subject, but their works serve as 2 termini: With GALILEO's Discorsi in 1638 our matter begins ) (for this is the history of mathematical theory), while LAGRANGE's Mechanique Analitique closed the mechanics of 1) There are three major historical works that bear on our subject. The first is A history of the theory of elasticity and of the strength of materials by I. ToDHUNTER, "edited and completed" by K. PEARSON, Vol. I, Cambridge, 1886. Unfortunately it is necessary to give warning that this book fails to meet the standard set by the histories ToDHUNTER lived to finish. Much of what ToDHUNTER left seems to be rather the rough notes for a book than the book itself; the parts due to PEARSON are fortunately distinguished by square brackets. Researches prior to 1800 are disposed of in the first chapter, 79 pages long and almost entirely the work of PEARSON; as frontispiece to a work whose title restricts it to theory he saw fit to supply a possibly original pen drawing entitled "Rupture. Sur faces of Cast-Iron".
From pebbles to planets, tigers to tables, pine trees to people; animate and inanimate, natural and artificial; bodies are everywhere. Bodies populate the world, acting and interacting with one another, and they are the subject-matter of Newton's laws of motion. But what is a body? And how can we know how they behave? In Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason, Katherine Brading and Marius Stan examine the struggle for a theory of bodies. At the beginning of the 18th century, physics was the branch of philosophy that studied bodies in general. Its primary task was to provide a qualitative account of the nature of bodies, including their essential properties, causal powers, and generic behaviors. Pursued by a variety of figures both canonical (from Leibniz to Kant) and less familiar (from Du Châtelet and Euler to d'Alembert and Lagrange), this proved a difficult task. At stake were the appropriate epistemologies and methods for theorizing about the natural world. Solutions demanded the combined resources of philosophy, physics, and mechanics: what Brading and Stan call a "philosophical mechanics." Brading and Stan analyze a century of widespread, concerted efforts to solve "the problem of bodies," they examine the consequences of the many failures, both for the problem itself and for philosophy more generally. They reveal relationships among disparate themes of 18th century physics and philosophy, from the nature of matter to the motion of a vibrating string; causation to the principle of least action; and the role of subtle matter in collision theory to analytic mechanics. All of these, Brading and Stan argue, are related to the eventual emergence of physics as an independent discipline, autonomous from philosophy, more than a century after Newton's Principia. This book provides a new framing of natural philosophy and its transformations in the Enlightenment; and it proposes an account of how physics and philosophy evolved into distinct fields of inquiry.
This book deploys the mathematical axioms of modern rational mechanics to understand minds as mechanical systems that exhibit actual, not metaphorical, forces, inertia, and motion. Using precise mental models developed in artificial intelligence the author analyzes motivation, attention, reasoning, learning, and communication in mechanical terms. These analyses provide psychology and economics with new characterizations of bounded rationality; provide mechanics with new types of materials exhibiting the constitutive kinematic and dynamic properties characteristic of different kinds of minds; and provide philosophy with a rigorous theory of hybrid systems combining discrete and continuous mechanical quantities. The resulting mechanical reintegration of the physical sciences that characterize human bodies and the mental sciences that characterize human minds opens traditional philosophical and modern computational questions to new paths of technical analysis.
This volume collects my shorter articles on the history of mechanics, some already published in various places, some revised from earlier papers, and some never published before. All of them began as lectures, and here they are printed as such, little changed from the last times I read them out to an audience. While the several articles concern different aspects of mechanics, overlap and even some repetition could not be avoided, since mechanics is one great science, and the same original oftentimes served more than one end in its growth. My three major historical treatises, which were published in Volumes (II) 11 , 2 12, and 13 of L. Euleri Opera Omnia, are not included. To simplify the printing I have also mostly omitted detailed reference to sources discussed more fully in those treatises, but of course I have added to the texts of the lectures citations of other sources, some notes in answer to questions a reader might ask, and biblio graphical notes at the end of each. I am grateful to the U.S. National Science Foundation for its support of this work through a grant to The Johns Hopkins University.
This book is a unique and comprehensive collection of pioneering contributions to the mechanics of crystals by J L Ericksen, a prominent and leading contributor to the study of the mechanics and mathematics of crystalline solids over the past 35 years.It presents a splendid corpus of research papers that cover areas on crystal symmetry, constitutive equations, defects and phase transitions — all topics of current importance to a broad group of workers in the field.The volume thus provides in one place material that is frequently referenced by numerous researchers on crystals across a spectrum of activities in areas of continuum mechanics, applied mathematics, engineering and materials science.Each group of papers or chapters in the book is preceded by a summary introduction that describes how the papers on that topic fit together, and in which Ericksen sketches the context of each paper and shares with the reader his thinking and insightfulness in writing it. The volume, edited by internationally renowned scholars whose works in finite elasticity and continuum mechanics have appeared in a variety of books and prestigious journals published over the past four decades, also includes a very interesting brief autobiography by Ericksen. In it he describes his early life in Oregon, his wartime experiences, his student days and postgraduate study, his introduction to scientific work, and what motivated him in his research. An English translation and revision of the first paper in this volume, originally published in Russian, appears here for the first time.
