The Elusive Notion of Motion

The Elusive Notion of Motion PDF Author: Alan A. Kubitz
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
ISBN: 1608449882
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
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

The Elusive Notion of Motion

The Elusive Notion of Motion PDF Author: Alan A. Kubitz
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
ISBN: 1608449882
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description
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

Averroes' Physics

Averroes' Physics PDF Author: Ruth Glasner
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191609978
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1088

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Book Description
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.

Honoré Fabri and the Concept of Impetus: A Bridge between Conceptual Frameworks

Honoré Fabri and the Concept of Impetus: A Bridge between Conceptual Frameworks PDF Author: Michael Elazar
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400716052
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
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.

Probabilities, Laws, and Structures

Probabilities, Laws, and Structures PDF Author: Dennis Dieks
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400730306
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
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.​

Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason

Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason PDF Author: Katherine Brading
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197678955
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
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.

The Mechanical Hypothesis in Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy

The Mechanical Hypothesis in Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy PDF Author: Sylvia Berryman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113948026X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
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.

Renaissance Drama 35

Renaissance Drama 35 PDF Author: Mary Floyd-Wilson
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810123657
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
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.

Quantum Theory

Quantum Theory PDF Author: Salvator Cannavo
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791493644
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
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.

Diffusion, Quantum Theory, and Radically Elementary Mathematics. (MN-47)

Diffusion, Quantum Theory, and Radically Elementary Mathematics. (MN-47) PDF Author: William G. Faris
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400865255
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
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.

Unitary Symmetry and Combinatorics

Unitary Symmetry and Combinatorics PDF Author: James D. Louck
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9812814728
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 642

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Book Description
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.