Download or read book The Elusive Notion of Motion written by Alan A. Kubitz and published by Dog Ear Publishing. This book was released on 2010-12 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever been confused by basic physics and intimidated by the mere thought of Einstein's relativity theories? If so, yet curiosity still beckons, this book is for you The reward? The colorful history of the elusive notion of motion and unique insights into the fundamental physics behind it all - including relativity. The physics of motion is so fundamental to science and the technological age in which we live that four of the most illustrious names in the annals of science owe their towering reputations, in large part, to their milestone work on the physics of motion. This book relates the stories of Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, and Albert E
Download or read book Averroes Physics written by Ruth Glasner and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-06-18 with total page 1088 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ruth Glasner presents an illuminating reappraisal of Averroes' physics. Glasner is the first scholar to base her interpretation on the full range of Averroes' writings, including texts that are extant only in Hebrew manuscripts and have not been hitherto studied. She reveals that Averroes changed his interpretation of the basic notions of physics - the structure of corporeal reality and the definition of motion - more than once. After many hesitations he offers a bold new interpretation of physics which Glasner calls 'Aristotelian atomism'. Ideas that are usually ascribed to scholastic scholars, and others that were traced back to Averroes but only in a very general form, are shown not only to have originated with him, but to have been fully developed by him into a comprehensive and systematic physical system. Unlike earlier Greek or Muslim atomistic systems, Averroes' Aristotelian atomism endeavours to be fully scientific, by Aristotelian standards, and still to provide a basis for an indeterministic natural philosophy. Commonly known as 'the commentator' and usually considered to be a faithful follower of Aristotle, Averroes is revealed in his commentaries on the Physics to be an original and sophisticated philosopher.
Download or read book Honor Fabri and the Concept of Impetus A Bridge between Conceptual Frameworks written by Michael Elazar and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-05-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the impetus-based physics of the Jesuit natural philosopher and mathematician Honoré Fabri (1608-1688), a senior representative of Jesuit scientists during the period between Galileo's death (1642) and Newton's Principia (1687). It shows how Fabri, while remaining loyal to a general Aristotelian outlook, managed to reinterpret the old concept of “impetus” in such a way as to assimilate into his physics building blocks of modern science, like Galileo’s law of fall and Descartes’ principle of inertia. This account of Fabri’s theory is a novel one, since his physics is commonly considered as a dogmatic rejection of the New Science, not essentially different from the medieval impetus theory. This book shows how New Science principles were taught in Jesuit Colleges in the 1640s, thus depicting the sophisticated manner in which new ideas were settling within the lion’s den of Catholic education.
Download or read book The Notion of Motion written by Walter John Carl and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Laws of Motion in Ancient Thought written by Francis MacDonald Cornford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-12 with total page 49 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains the text of Francis Cornford's 1931 inaugural lecture upon becoming Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy in the University of Cambridge.
Download or read book Probabilities Laws and Structures written by Dennis Dieks and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-02-02 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, the third in this Springer series, contains selected papers from the four workshops organized by the ESF Research Networking Programme "The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective" (PSE) in 2010: Pluralism in the Foundations of Statistics Points of Contact between the Philosophy of Physics and the Philosophy of Biology The Debate on Mathematical Modeling in the Social Sciences Historical Debates about Logic, Probability and Statistics The volume is accordingly divided in four sections, each of them containing papers coming from the workshop focussing on one of these themes. While the programme's core topic for the year 2010 was probability and statistics, the organizers of the workshops embraced the opportunity of building bridges to more or less closely connected issues in general philosophy of science, philosophy of physics and philosophy of the special sciences. However, papers that analyze the concept of probability for various philosophical purposes are clearly a major theme in this volume, as it was in the previous volumes of the same series. This reflects the impressive productivity of probabilistic approaches in the philosophy of science, which form an important part of what has become known as formal epistemology - although, of course, there are non-probabilistic approaches in formal epistemology as well. It is probably fair to say that Europe has been particularly strong in this area of philosophy in recent years.
Download or read book Being and Motion written by Thomas Nail and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2018-12-10 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than at any other time in human history, we live in an age defined by movement and mobility; and yet, we lack a unifying theory which takes this seriously as a starting point for philosophy. The history of philosophy has systematically explained movement as derived from something else that does not move: space, eternity, force, and time. Why, when movement has always been central to human societies, did a philosophy based on movement never take hold? This book finally overturns this long-standing metaphysical tradition by placing movement at the heart of philosophy. In doing so, Being and Motion provides a completely new understanding of the most fundamental categories of ontology from a movement-oriented perspective: quality, quantity, relation, modality, and others. It also provides the first history of the philosophy of motion, from early prehistoric mythologies up to contemporary ontologies. Through its systematic ontology of movement, Being and Motion provides a path-breaking historical ontology of our present.
Download or read book Theory of Stability of Motion written by Ioėlʹ Gilʹevich Malkin and published by . This book was released on 1959 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason written by Katherine Brading and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-27 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Mechanical Hypothesis in Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy written by Sylvia Berryman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-06 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has long been thought that the ancient Greeks did not take mechanics seriously as part of the workings of nature, and that therefore their natural philosophy was both primitive and marginal. In this book Sylvia Berryman challenges that assumption, arguing that the idea that the world works 'like a machine' can be found in ancient Greek thought, predating the early modern philosophy with which it is most closely associated. Her discussion ranges over topics including balancing and equilibrium, lifting water, sphere-making and models of the heavens, and ancient Greek pneumatic theory, with detailed analysis of thinkers such as Aristotle, Archimedes, and Hero of Alexandria. Her book shows scholars of ancient Greek philosophy why it is necessary to pay attention to mechanics, and shows historians of science why the differences between ancient and modern reactions to mechanics are not as great as was generally thought.
Download or read book Renaissance Drama 35 written by Mary Floyd-Wilson and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2006-06-22 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renaissance Drama, an annual and interdisciplinary publication, is devoted to drama and performance as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The essays in each volume explore traditional canons of drama, the significance of performance (broadly construed) to early modern culture, and the impact of new forms of interpretation on the study of Renaissance plays, theatre, and performance. This special issue of Renaissance Drama "Embodiment and Environment in Early Modern Drama and Performance" is guest-edited by Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. Anatomized, fragmented, and embarrassed, the body has long been fruitful ground for scholars of early modern literature and culture. The contributors suggest, however, that period conceptions of embodiment cannot be understood without attending to transactional relations between body and environment. The volume explores the environmentally situated nature of early modern psychology and physiology, both as depicted in dramatic texts and as a condition of theatrical performance. Individual essays shed new light on the ways that travel and climatic conditions were understood to shape and reshape class status, gender, ethnicity, national identity, and subjectivity; they focus on theatrical ecologies, identifying the playhouse as a "special environment" or its own "ecosystem," where performances have material, formative effects on the bodies of actors and audience members; and they consider transactions between theatrical, political, and cosmological environments. For the contributors to this volume, the early modern body is examined primarily through its engagements with and operations in specific environments that it both shapes and is shaped by. Embodiment, these essays show, is without borders.
Download or read book The Emergence of the Concept of Motion written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Quantum Theory written by Salvator Cannavo and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2009-02-26 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In straightforward and nontechnical language, a philosopher of science goes to the very heart of what is still the central subject in modern physics, namely, quantum theory, with its astonishing ability to predict—yet not explain. There, he encounters and unravels the maze of bewildering puzzles that, for nearly a century, have locked our most eminent theoreticians in a whirlpool of ongoing controversy. Salvator Cannavo breaks radically with this tradition of searching for a generally acceptable interpretation of quantum theory by urging a complete withdrawal from the fray. In doing so, he first highlights the now established adjunctive role of quantum theory in the elaboration of string theory and other developing branches of explanatory physical theory, and then recommends a new focus for the channeling of creative effort in contemporary theoretical physics.
Download or read book The Theory of the Relativity of Motion written by Richard Chace Tolman and published by Theclassics.Us. This book was released on 2013-09 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 edition. Excerpt: ...(110) and (111), we have--=--11--J,2fa--... + 1W1 + Wj + = 0, which gives us the desired proof that just as in the older Newtonian mechanics the total energy of an isolated system of particles is a conservative quantity. On the Location of Energy in Space. 90. This proof of the conservation of energy in a system of interacting particles justifies us in the belief that the concept of energy will not fail to retain in the newer mechanics the position of great importance which it gradually acquired in the older systems of physical theory. Indeed, our newer considerations have augmented the important role of energy by adding to its properties the attribute of mass or inertia, and thus leading to the further belief that matter and energy are in reality different names for the same fundamental entity. The importance of this entity, energy, makes it very interesting to consider the possibility of ascribing a definite location in space to any given quantity of energy. In the older mechanics we had a hazy notion that the kinetic energy of a moving body was probably located in some way in the moving body itself, and possibly a vague idea that the potential energy of a raised weight might be located in the space between the weight and the earth. Our discovery of the relation between mass and energy has made it possible, however, to give a much more definite, although not a complete, answer to inquiries of this kind. In our discussions of the dynamics of a particle (Chapter VI, Section 61) we saw that an acceptance of Newton's principle of the equality of action and reaction forced us to ascribe an increased mass to a moving particle over that which it has at rest. This increase in the mass of the moving particle is necessarily located either in the...
Download or read book Diffusion Quantum Theory and Radically Elementary Mathematics MN 47 written by William G. Faris and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-08 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diffusive motion--displacement due to the cumulative effect of irregular fluctuations--has been a fundamental concept in mathematics and physics since Einstein's work on Brownian motion. It is also relevant to understanding various aspects of quantum theory. This book explains diffusive motion and its relation to both nonrelativistic quantum theory and quantum field theory. It shows how diffusive motion concepts lead to a radical reexamination of the structure of mathematical analysis. The book's inspiration is Princeton University mathematics professor Edward Nelson's influential work in probability, functional analysis, nonstandard analysis, stochastic mechanics, and logic. The book can be used as a tutorial or reference, or read for pleasure by anyone interested in the role of mathematics in science. Because of the application of diffusive motion to quantum theory, it will interest physicists as well as mathematicians. The introductory chapter describes the interrelationships between the various themes, many of which were first brought to light by Edward Nelson. In his writing and conversation, Nelson has always emphasized and relished the human aspect of mathematical endeavor. In his intellectual world, there is no sharp boundary between the mathematical, the cultural, and the spiritual. It is fitting that the final chapter provides a mathematical perspective on musical theory, one that reveals an unexpected connection with some of the book's main themes.
Download or read book Objectivity written by Lorraine Daston and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences — and show how the concept differs from alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images. From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences — from anatomy to crystallography — are those featured in scientific atlases: the compendia that teach practitioners of a discipline what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Atlas images define the working objects of the sciences of the eye: snowflakes, galaxies, skeletons, even elementary particles. Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology. As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity — or truth-to-nature or trained judgment — is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to any one interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity — and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically.
Download or read book Unitary Symmetry and Combinatorics written by James D. Louck and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2008 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Notation -- Quantum angular momentum -- Composite systems -- Graphs and adjacency diagrams -- Generating functions -- The D[lambda] polynomials: form -- Operator actions in Hilbert space -- The D[lambda] polynomials: structure -- The general linear and unitary groups -- Tensor operator theory -- Compendium A. Basic algebraic objects -- Compendium B. Combinatorial objects.