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"Mechanics History."
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How mechanics shaped the modern world
This unique book presents a nontechnical view of the history of mechanics, from the Big Bang to present day. The impact of mechanics on the evolution of a variety of subjects is vividly illustrated, including astronomy, geology, astrophysics, anthropology, archeology, ancient history, Renaissance art, music, meteorology, modern structural engineering, mathematics, medicine, warfare, and sports. While enormous in scope, the subject matter is covered (with ample photographic support) at a level designed to capture the interest of both the learned and the curious. The book concludes with a creative and thoughtful examination of the current state of mechanics and possibilities for the future of mechanics. This book also: Presents an offbeat, nontechnical chronology of the history of mechanics, from the Big Bang to present day Lays out a complicated scientific subject in a rapid-fire narrative that is both interesting and informative for the non-specialist reader Covers subjects ranging from Egyptian civilization, music and musical instruments, art, and climate dynamics and demonstrates how their evolution both impacted and was impacted by humankind's understanding of mechanics Thoughtfully examines the current state of mechanics and possibilities for future research and innovation.
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Thinking with objects : the transformation of mechanics in the seventeenth century
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.
eBook
Embodiment and Mechanisation
Drawing on philosophical, neurological and cultural answers to the question of what constitutes a body, this book explores the interaction between mechanistic beliefs about human bodies and the successive technologies that have established and illustrated these beliefs. At the same time, it draws upon newer perspectives on technology and embodied human thought in order to highlight the limitations and inadequacies of such beliefs and suggest alternative perspectives. In so doing, it provides a position from which widely held assumptions about our relationship with technology can be understood and questioned, by both showing how these presuppositions have emerged and developed, and examining the extent to which they are dependent upon our grasp of specific technologies. Illustrated with examples from the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, as well as the industrial age and the recent eras of informatics, gene science and nanotechnology, Embodiment and Mechanisation highlights the ways in which technological changes have led to shifts in the definition of machine and body, investigating their shared underlying belief that all matter can be reduced to a common substance. From clockwork and cadavers to engines and energy, this volume reveals our long-standing fascination with and enduring commitment to the idea that bodies are machines and that machines are in some sense bodies. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the humanities and social sciences with interests in the sociology of science and technology, embodiment, cultural studies and the history of ideas.
eBook
The Mechanical Hypothesis in Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy
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.
eBook
In the grip of the distant universe
This is a book about the history of the science of inertia. Nobody denies the existence of the forces of inertia, but they are branded as “fictitious” because they do not fit smoothly into modern physics. Named by Kepler and given mathematical form by Newton, the force of inertia remains aloof because it has no obvious local cause. At the end of the 19th century, Ernst Mach bravely claimed that the inertia of an object was the result of its instantaneous interaction with all matter in the universe. Many other well-known physicists, including Aristotle, Galileo, Descartes and Einstein, are shown to have tackled this difficult subject. The book also concentrates on inertia research in the 20th century, taking place under the shadow of general relativity, which is seen as uncomfortable with Mach's principle. A Newtonian paradigm, based on action-at-a-distance forces, is discussed throughout the book, allowing the revival of Mach's principle as the only coherent explanation of the inertia forces which play such an important role in the laboratory and in the cosmos.
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Chasing the demon : a secret history of the quest for the sound barrier, and the band of American aces who conquered it
\"The New York Times bestselling author of Viper Pilot chronicles another thrilling chapter in American aviation history: the race to break the sound barrier. In the aftermath of World War II, the United States accelerated the development of technologies that would give it an advantage over the Soviet Union. Airpower, combined with nuclear weapons, offered a formidable check on Soviet aggression. In 1947, the United States Air Force was established. Meanwhile, scientists and engineers were pioneering a revolutionary new type of aircraft which could do what no other machine had ever done: reach mach 1--a speed faster than the movement of sound--which pilots called \"the demon.\" Chasing the Demon recreates an era of excitement and danger, adventure and innovation, when the future of the free world was at stake and American ingenuity took the world from the postwar years to the space age. While the pressure to succeed was high, it was unknown whether man or machine could survive such tremendous speeds. A decorated military pilot with years of experience flying supersonic fighter jets, Dan Hampton reveals in-depth the numerous potential hazards that emerged with the Air Force's test flights: controls broke down, engines flamed out, wings snapped, and planes and pilots disintegrated as they crashed into the desert floor. He also introduces the men who pushed the envelope taking the cockpits of these jets, including World War II ace Major Dick Bong and twenty-four-year-old Captain Chuck Yeager, who made history flying the Bell X-1 plane faster than the speed of sound on October 14, 1947. Illustrated with thirty black-and-white photographs, Chasing the Demon recalls this period of the emerging Cold War and the brave adventurers pursing the final frontier in aviation\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Union Resilience in Troubled Times
The essays in this volume examine the historic and present-day role of the internal critics of the postwar regimes in Eastern Europe who, whatever their intentions, used Marxism as critique to demolish Marxism as ideocracy, but did not succeed in replacing it.
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