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4300 results in General and Classical Physics

Page 158 of 215

  • Preface

  • Andrew R. King, University of Leicester, Oded Regev, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa
  • Book:
    Physics with Answers
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    28 May 1997, pp vii-viii

  • Summary

    Physics is the most fundamental of the sciences, and some knowledge of it is required in fields as disparate as chemistry, biology, engineering, medicine, and architecture. Our experience in teaching physics to a wide variety of audiences in the U.S. and Europe over many years is that, while students may acquire some familiarity with formal concepts of physics, they are all too often uneasy about applying these concepts in a variety of practical situations. As an elementary example, they may be able to quote the law of conservation of angular momentum in the absence of external torques, but be quite unable to explain why a spinning top does not fall over. The physicist Richard Feynman coined the phrase “fragile knowledge” to describe this kind of mismatch between knowledge of an idea and the ability to apply it.

    In our view there is really only one way of acquiring a robust ability to use physics: the repeated employment of physical concepts in a wide variety of applications. Only then can students appreciate the strength of these ideas and feel confident in using them. This book aims to meet this need by providing a large number of problems for individual study. We think it very important to provide a full solution for each one, so that students can check their progress or discover where they have gone wrong. We hope that users of this book will be able to acquire a working knowledge of those parts of physics they need for their science.

  • 1 - Universal laws of nature

  • Joseph L. McCauley, University of Houston
  • Book:
    Classical Mechanics
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    08 May 1997, pp 1-44

  • Summary

    In the presentation of the motions of the heavens, the ancients began with the principle that a natural retrograde motion must of necessity be a uniform circular motion. Supported in this particular by the authority of Aristotle, an axiomatic character was given to this proposition, whose content, in fact, is very easily grasped by one with a naive point of view; men deemed it necessary and ceased to consider another possibility. Without reflecting, Copernicus and Tycho Brahe still embraced this conception, and naturally the astronomers of their time did likewise.

    Johannes Kepler, by Max Caspar

    Mechanics in the context of history

    It is very tempting to follow the mathematicians and present classical mechanics in an axiomatic or postulational way, especially in a book about theory and methods. Newton wrote in that way for reasons that are described in Westfall's biography (1980). Following the abstract Euclidean mode of presentation would divorce our subject superficially from the history of western European thought and therefore from its real foundations, which are abstractions based upon reproducible empiricism. A postulational approach, which is really a Platonic approach, would mask the way that universal laws of regularities of nature were discovered in the late middle ages in an atmosphere where authoritarian religious academics purported pseudo-scientifically to justify the burning of witches and other nonconformers to official dogma, and also tried to define science by the appeal to authority.

Page 158 of 215