Thinking with Objects: The Transformation of Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century

Forside
JHU Press, 17. nov. 2006 - 389 sider

Thinking with Objects offers a fresh view of the transformation that took place in mechanics during the 17th century. By giving center stage to objects—levers, inclined planes, beams, pendulums, springs, and falling and projected bodies—Domenico Bertoloni Meli provides a unique and comprehensive portrayal of mechanics as practitioners understood it at the time.

Bertoloni Meli reexamines such major texts as Galileo’s Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, and Newton’s Principia, and in them finds a reliance on objects that has escaped proper understanding. From Pappus of Alexandria to Guidobaldo dal Monte, Bertoloni Meli sees significant developments in the history of mechanical experimentation, all of them crucial for understanding Galileo. Bertoloni Meli uses similarities and tensions between dal Monte and Galileo as a springboard for exploring the revolutionary nature of seventeenth-century mechanics.

Examining objects helps us appreciate the shift from the study to the practice of mechanics and challenges artificial dichotomies among practical and conceptual pursuits, mathematics, and experiment.

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Innhold

Introduction
1
Machines in the Field in the Book and in the Study
18
Floating Bodies and a Mathematical Science of Motion
40
The Formulation of New Mathematical Sciences
66
The Motion and Collision of Particles
135
Intermezzo Generational and Institutional Changes
161
Projected Oscillating and Orbiting Bodies
190
Colliding Bodies Springs and Beams
224
A New WorldSystem
255
Causes Conservation and the New Mathematics
288
Conclusion Mapping the Transformations of Mechanics
308
Notes
317
References
355
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Om forfatteren (2006)

Domenico Bertoloni Meli is a professor of history and philosophy of science at Indiana University.

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