Related papers: The mechanical career of Councillor Orffyreus, con…
Ever since Werner Heisenberg's 1927 paper on uncertainty, there has been considerable hesitancy in simultaneously considering positions and momenta in quantum contexts, since these are incompatible observables. But this persistent…
At the end of the 19th century light was regarded as an electromagnetic wave propagating in a material medium called ether. The speed c appearing in Maxwell's wave equations was the speed of light with respect to the ether. Therefore,…
Application of Newton's ideas from "Principia" gives many new results in mechanics. Here we explore the question ``What form of extra force will maintain the magnitude of a vector constant of the motion while changing its direction?''
Newton's basic ideas developed and evolved throughout his career and changed in sometimes surprisingly profound ways. In this paper I propose an outline of the evolution of Newton's conceptual framework by following the development of his…
In this note I sketch the work of Christiaan Huygens to develop a theory of motion and its application to elastic collisions. In this theory he uses the relativity of uniform linear motion to derive the conservation of momentum and kinetic…
A quantum-mechanical theory of gravitation is presented, where the motion of particles is based on the optics of de Broglie waves. Here the large-scale geometry of the universe is inherently flat, and its age is not constrained to < 13 Gyr.…
The equations of motion of an isospin-carrying particle in a Yang-Mills and gravitational field were first proposed in 1968 by Kerner, who considered geodesics in a Kaluza-Klein-type framework. Two years later the flat space Kerner…
This is an adapatation by U. Frisch of an English translation by Thomas E. Burton of Euler's memoir `Principes g\'en\'eraux du mouvement des fluides' (Euler, 1775b). Burton's translation appeared in Fluid Dynamics, 34} (1999) pp. 801-82,…
In a previous article we gave the general foundations of the theory of movement considered from a philosophical and mathematical point of view. Philosophical it meant to understand the opposition of the one and the multiple, mathematically…
Interest in Brownian motion was shared by different communities: this phenomenon was first observed by the botanist Robert Brown in 1827, then theorised by physicists in the 1900s, and eventually modelled by mathematicians from the 1920s,…
In the post-Maxwellian era, sensing that the tide of discoveries in electromagnetim indicated a decline of the mechanical view, Einstein replaced Newton's three absolutes -- space, time and mass, with a single one, the velocity of light.…
The kinetic theory of Maxwell and Boltzmann has been the subject of major scientific controversies. The alleged incompatibility between the reversible nature of the equations of classical mechanics and the increase of entropy, which, in the…
A consistent classical and quantum relativistic mechanics can be constructed if Einstein's covariant time is considered as a dynamical variable. The evolution of a system is then parametrized by a universal invariant identified with…
In 1614 Johann Georg Locher, a student of the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner, proposed a physical mechanism to explain how the Earth could orbit the sun. An orbit, Locher said, is a perpetual fall. He proposed this despite the fact…
I discuss the physical basis of classical mechanics, such as expressed commonly using the framework of Newton's Principia. Newton's formulation of the laws of motion is seen to have quite a few ambiguities and shortcomings. Therefore I…
Euler's interpretation of Newton's gravity (NG) as Archimedes' thrust in a fluid ether is presented in some detail. Then a semi-heuristic mechanism for gravity, close to Euler's, is recalled and compared with the latter. None of these two…
A tradition handed down among physicists maintains that classical physics is a perfectly deterministic theory capable of predicting the future with absolute certainty, independently of any interpretations. It also tells that it was quantum…
This is an annotated translation from Latin of 'Principia pro motu sanguinis per arterias determinando' in which Euler develops the first known work on the mechanics of flows in elastic tubes, intended to the first contest of the Dijon…
Constructor theory seeks to express all fundamental scientific theories in terms of a dichotomy between possible and impossible physical transformations - those that can be caused to happen and those that cannot. This is a departure from…
After some more than four centuries from the formulation and publication (in Astronomia Nova) of the Kepler's Equation, which relates the eccentric (and, intermediately, the true) anomaly of the planetary trajectories to the uniformly…