The Renaissance Of Mechanics

Mixing scientific, historic and socio-economic vision, this unique book complements two previously published volumes on the history of continuum mechanics from this distinguished author. In this volume, Gérard A. Maugin looks at the period from the renaissance to the twentieth century and he includes an appraisal of the ever enduring competition between molecular and continuum modelling views. Chapters trace early works in hydraulics and fluid mechanics not covered in the other volumes and the author investigates experimental approaches, essentially before the introduction of a true concept of stress tensor. The treatment of such topics as the viscoelasticity of solids and plasticity, fracture theory, and the role of geometry as a cornerstone of the field, are all explored. Readers will find a kind of socio-historical appraisal of the seminal contributions by our direct masters in the second half of the twentieth century. The analysis of the teaching and research texts by Duhem, Poincaré and Hilbert on continuum mechanics is key: these provide the most valuable documentary basis on which a revival of continuum mechanics and its formalization were offered in the late twentieth century. Altogether, the three volumes offer a generous conspectus of the developments of continuum mechanics between the sixteenth century and the dawn of the twenty-first century. Mechanical engineers, applied mathematicians and physicists alike will all be interested in this work which appeals to all curious scientists for whom continuum mechanics as a vividly evolving science still has its own mysteries.

This book gives an account of the origins of theoretical mechanics in antiquity, its limited reception in the Arabic and Latin Middle Ages, and its recovery and subsequent development in Italy to the time of Galileo. From late antiquity to the fifteenth century, the ancient science of mechanics—the theory of machines—was almost completely unknown in the Latin west. Then, from the mid-fifteenth century on, Italian humanists began to recover the ancient texts, and from them through the sixteenth century Italian mathematicians restored the ancient science of mechanics. The Renaissance of Mechanics first examines the principal ancient works on mechanics—the Aristotelian Mechanical Problems, the mechanical geometry of Archimedes, and Hero’s Mechanics—and then describes their limited reception in the Arabic world and their even more limited transmission to the medieval Latin west. It then traces their recovery in the fifthteenth century and their assimilation in the sixteenth by Niccolò Tartaglia, Francesco Maurolico, and Guidobaldo dal Monte, culminating in Galileo’s rediscovery of Hero’s lost mechanical principles. The book ends with an examination of Galileo’s mechanics and its relation to his new science of motion, and suggests how modern mechanics would emerge from these ancient roots. Detailed analyses of these works offer new insights and interpretations while remaining accessible to general historians. The Renaissance of Mechanics will be of especial interest to those working in the fields of renaissance humanism and the history of ancient, medieval, and renaissance science and mathematics.

A collection of fifteen essays on some of the problems associated with the Scientific Revolution.

Gives accurate and reliable summaries of the current state of research. It includes entries on philosophers, problems, terms, historical periods, subjects and the cultural context of Renaissance Philosophy. Furthermore, it covers Latin, Arabic, Jewish, Byzantine and vernacular philosophy, and includes entries on the cross-fertilization of these philosophical traditions. A unique feature of this encyclopedia is that it does not aim to define what Renaissance philosophy is, rather simply to cover the philosophy of the period between 1300 and 1650.

In Copernicus in the Cultural Debates of the Renaissance, Pietro Daniel Omodeo presents a general overview of the reception of Copernicus’s astronomical proposal from the years immediately preceding the publication of De revolutionibus (1543) to the Roman prohibition of heliocentric hypotheses in 1616. Relying on a detailed investigation of early modern sources, the author systematically examines a series of issues ranging from computation to epistemology, natural philosophy, theology and ethics. In addition to offering a pluralistic and interdisciplinary perspective on post-Copernican astronomy, the study goes beyond purely cosmological and geometrical issues and engages in a wide-ranging discussion of how Copernicus’s legacy interacted with European culture and how his image and theories evolved as a result.

The question of when and how the basic concepts that characterize modern science arose in Western Europe has long been central to the history of science. This book examines the transition from Renaissance engineering and philosophy of nature to classical mechanics oriented on the central concept of velocity. For this new edition, the authors include a new discussion of the doctrine of proportions, an analysis of the role of traditional statics in the construction of Descartes' impact rules, and go deeper into the debate between Descartes and Hobbes on the explanation of refraction. They also provide significant new material on the early development of Galileo's work on mechanics and the law of fall.

This updated and augmented second edition covers the history of mechanics in such a way as to explain how this all-important discipline shaped our world. Like the first edition, Dr. Allen presents the material in an engaging, accessible manner, with many historic insights and thorough explanations of attending concepts. The text retains its coverage of classical mechanics, essentially Newtonian mechanics, and adds chapters on three additional topics that go well beyond classical mechanics: relativity, quantum/nanomechanics, and biomechanics.