![]() Whatever the specifics, we now know that Galileo did not use mathematics to discover the law of falling bodies or, for that matter, most anything else he knew about the physical world he experimented, and then used mathematics to explain what he found.įour years after Galileo's death, a seventeen-year old in the Netherlands, unaware of Galileo's results, discovered the law of falling bodies mathematically, using the technique conjectured by Drake to explain Galileo's discovery. The intervening years have seen the growth of a minor industry of scholars devoted to reproducing Galileo's experiments and arguing over the exact steps involved. In 1973, Drake himself furnished the evidence that refuted all previous arguments, including his own, because in the meantime he had found unpublished manuscripts relating to experiments on fall that Galileo had undertaken. In 1969, Stillman Drake attempted a reconstruction that avoided the medieval connection and, instead, used nothing more than the properties of an arithmetic progression. Until fairly recently, most historians of science believed that Galileo had made the discovery mathematically by reasoning from established medieval mean-speed rules, although his actual thought process was greatly debated. Galileo discovered the law of falling bodies, namely, that the distance fallen from rest is as the square of the time. In fact, although their words were similar, the mathematical universes of Galileo and Bernoulli were worlds apart.Ī famous example reveals the difference. Galileo Galilei seems to have anticipated Bernoulli's attitude in his famous dictum ‘Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe.It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures.’ Ga naar eind 3. The prophet of the revolution is equally recognizable. Unfortunately, this interpretation encounters the awkward problem that the new physics was not originally written in the language of the new mathematics. ![]() The new physics was dynamics the new mathematics that accompanied it was the calculus. In fact, so strongly is the Principia and its subsequent exegesis associated with the new physics that commentators frequently fall into the trap of defining the mathematization of nature in the seventeenth century according to Newton's accomplishments. The supreme example of the new mathematical physics is generally recognized to be Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). But what did this defining phenomenon of the Scientific Revolution entail? The mathematization of physics was an essential contribution of early modern science. Yet, well into the seventeenth century this union of nature and abstract reasoning was exceedingly rare. it is difficult to imagine a time when explanations of natural phenomena, particularly physical events involving the motion of inanimate objects, did not involve mathematics. Nearly three centuries later, when some people are even claiming that physics has become too dependent upon mathematics and its seductive sense of certainty, Ga naar eind 2. ‘He who undertakes to write Physics without understanding mathematics truly deals with trifles.’ Johann Bernoulli sent this blunt assessment to G.W. ‘Following in the footsteps of geometry’: the mathematical world of Christiaan Huygens
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