Related papers: The mechanical career of Councillor Orffyreus, con…
The following translation of Leonhard Euler's "Examination of an Artifice for Propelling a Ship by the Principle of Internal Motion," originally published in 1750, offers a glimpse into a fascinating historical debate in the field of…
Shortly after the middle of the past century, a comprehensive presentation of Continuum Mechanics was written under supervision of Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III in two volumes of Siegfried Fluegge's Handbuch der Physik, a first in 1960…
One of the most important philosophers in history, the German Friedrich Nietzsche, is almost ignored by physicists. This author who declared the death of God in the 19th century was a science enthusiast, especially in the second period of…
Even if Einstein brought major contributions as a founder of quantum mechanics, he remained deeply unsatisfied with the bases of this structure he knew to be so efficient for physics. His critics are often known through his numerous…
The present work examines and compares the approaches of Jacob Bernoulli and Leonhard Euler to the problem of ship propulsion generated by internal forces. Jacob Bernoulli's analysis, developed in the late 17th century, relies on geometric…
The discussion on time-reversal in quantum mechanics exists at least since Wigner's ``Uber die Operation der Zeitumkehr in der Quantenmechanik'' paper in 1932. If and how the dynamics of the quantum world is time-reversible has been the…
The law of centripetal force governing the motion of celestial bodies in eccentric conic sections, has been established and thoroughly investigated by Sir Isaac Newton in his Principia Mathematica. Yet its profound implications on the…
In this paper, I comment on a recent paper by Michel Janssen and J\"urgen Renn. In his published paper of November 18, 1915, Einstein presented a solution to the problem of the perihelion motion of Mercury and obtained the correct result of…
That the speed of light is always c=300,000km/s relative to any observer in nonaccelerating motion is one of the foundational concepts of physics. Experimentally this was supposed to have been first revealed by the 1887 Michelson-Morley…
Sir Arthur Eddington is considered one of the greatest astrophysicist of the twentieth century and yet he gained a stigma when, in the 1930s, he embarked on a quest to develop a unified theory of gravity and quantum mechanics. His attempts…
The general prohibition of books advocating heliocentric theory put many progressive Jesuits in a difficult position. One of the most prominent Jesuit scientists of the 18th century, Rogerius Boscovich, was in particularly affected by…
Plutarchus, circa 100 AD, in his early book on "astrophysics" --in which he exposed, in a sense, a general theory of gravitation-- wrote the noticeable passage: <<The Moon gets the guarantee of not falling down just from its motion and from…
Throughout the early history of Science the heliocentric world model was refused because it contradicted the thoughts of Aristotle and the medieval "Impetus" theory of movement. Even Galileo's sky observations did not lead to any acceptance…
Quantum mechanics is a theory that is as effective as it is counterintuitive. While quantum practices operate impeccably, they compel us to embrace enigmatic phenomena like the collapse of the state vector and non-locality, thereby pushing…
The evolution of theoretical physics in the XX century differs significantly from that in XVII-XIX centuries. While continuous progress is observed for theoretical physics in XVII-XIX centuries, modern physics contains many questions that…
While Kepler was still working in Graz during 1598, some letters to his mentor Michael Maestlin demonstrate his interest in astronomical clocks and machines. The first letter, dated January 6, 1598 contains a detailed description of a…
An attempt is made to de-mystify the apparent "paradox" between microscopic time revsersibility and macroscopic time irreversibility. It is our common experience that a hot cup of coffee cools down to room temperature and it never…
If the presence of a gravitational field breaks the Lorentz symmetry valid for special relativity, an "absolute motion" might be detectable. We summarize a scalar theory of gravity with a such "ether", which starts from a tentative…
This is an annotated translation of E126 'De novo genere oscillationum', in which Euler derived for the first time, the differential equation of the (undamped) simple harmonic oscillator under harmonic excitation, namely, the motion of an…
We prove that, when linearized, the governing equations of an incompressible elastic continuum yield Maxwell's equations as corollaries. Through judicious distinction between the referential and local descriptions, the principle of material…