Related papers: Aristotle, projectiles and guns
We study how the paradigm of Newton's science, based on the organization of scientific knowledge as a series of mathematical laws, was definitively accepted in science courses - in the last decades of the XVIII century, in England as well…
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…
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 problem of determining the angle at which a point mass launched from ground level with a given speed is a standard exercise in mechanics. Similar, yet conceptually and calculationally more difficult problems have been suggested to…
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…
The Copernican Principle (which says the Earth and sun are not unique) should have observational consequences and thus be testable. Galileo Galilei thought he could measure the true angular diameters of stars with his telescope; according…
A classic problem of the motion of a projectile thrown at an angle to the horizon is studied. Air resistance force and Magnus force are taken into account with the use of the quadratic laws. We consider the asymptotic motion of the…
The publication of Principia Mathematica in 1678 by Newton became known the celestial bodies motion laws, which characterize the Classical Mechanics. Thereafter made sense to search about the movement of these bodies from known initial…
What are the historical evidence concerning the turning of the spyglass into an astronomical instrument, the telescope? In Sidereus Nuncius and in his private correspondence Galileo tells the reader what he did with the telescope, but he…
In the study, analyzes were made for one-dimensional constant acceleration motion using the Arduino microcontroller and distance sensor, using the position and time values obtained for the movement of an object thrown from bottom to top…
The Art of Memory started with Aristotle's questions on memory. During its long evolution, it had important contributions from alchemist, was transformed by Ramon Llull and apparently ended with Giordano Bruno, who was considered the best…
A classic problem of the motion of a projectile thrown at an angle to the horizon is studied. Air resistance force is taken into account. The quadratic law for the resistance force is used. An analytic approach applies for the…
The motion of rockets is part of the study devoted to the motion of variable mass systems. Notably those in which the mass leaves permanently the considered system. Rockets are propelled forward by the reaction force produced by the hot…
Although the differential calculus was invented by Newton, Kepler established his famous laws 70 years earlier by using the same idea, namely to find a path in a nonuniform field of force by small steps. It is generally not known that…
Aristotle is generally accepted as the father of logic. The ideas that he raised in his study of logical reasoning carried the development of science over the centuries. Today, in the era of AI, this title of the fatherhood of logic has a…
Between 1905 and 1907, Einstein first tried to extend the special theory of relativity in such a way so as to explain gravitational phenomena. This was the most natural and simplest path to be taken. These investigations did not fit in with…
The question of annual stellar parallax is usually viewed as having been a "win-win situation" for seventeenth-century astronomers who subscribed to the Copernican view of universe in which the Earth orbits the Sun and the Sun is one of…
In the famous thought experiment studied in this article, Galileo attempted to refute the Aristotelian hypothesis that heavier bodies should fall more quickly than lighter ones. After pointing out some inconsistencies in Galileo's approach,…
Since its original formulation by Isaac Newton in 1685, the problem of determining bodies of minimal resistance moving through a fluid has been one of the classical problems in the calculus of variations. Initially posed for cylindrically…
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,…