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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Architecture of Nature vOLUME 1 OF 4: A Treatise on the History of Physics

The Architecture of Nature vOLUME 1 OF 4: A Treatise on the History of Physics

Montgomery, Richard Murdoch

Paperback

Series: The Scottish Science Companion Books

General World History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798170692354
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 584
Weight: 1.70
Height: 1.18 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What this treatise is for, what it does that a textbook cannot, the single rule that governs it, and what the reader is owed by way of warning. A physics education teaches a set of equations and the skill of using them. It does not, and cannot within its own limits, explain why those equations have the form they have, why they were once thought to be otherwise, or what it cost to arrive at them. This treatise is an attempt to supply that missing half. The purpose may be stated in one sentence. It is to show that every principal equation in physics has a history, and that the equation is not fully understood until the history is known. The claim is not sentimental. Consider Newton's second law. Every reader has met it as a relation between force, mass and acceleration, an equality with three symbols. What Newton wrote was a proportion between a blow and a change in the quantity of motion - no equals sign, no constant, no acceleration, and no derivative, since none was needed. The two statements are not the same. The one Newton wrote holds for a body whose mass is changing and the familiar one does not; and the reason the familiar one is written as it is has to do with a choice of units made in the eighteenth century, which the notation conceals. A student who learns the formula alone learns something true and something incomplete. What is lost is the shape of the problem the law was built to solve, and with it the ability to see what the law would look like if that problem had been posed differently. This treatise is written for readers who want that back. The governing rule One rule runs through all five volumes and shapes every chapter. No principal equation may appear in its modern textbook form as though delivered. Each is reconstructed from the intellectual and experimental problem that made it necessary, stated in the notation of its own moment, with the modern form supplied afterwards as a translation and labelled as such. So Kepler's third law appears here as the proportion he wrote - that the squares of the periodic times are as the cubes of the mean distances - and the modern rendering is given afterwards, with a note that its constant of proportionality conceals the assertion Kepler was actually making, namely that the ratio is the same for every planet. So Maxwell's theory, in Volume II, will have the twenty equations it had, not the four it acquired later at other hands. So the law of universal gravitation appears without a constant.of gravitation, because there was none until Cavendish weighed the earth in 1798, a hundred and eleven years after the law was published, and because everything the law was used for is a ratio in which the constant cancels. The rule has a cost and the reader should know it in advance. It makes this a poor book to revise from. A reader who needs the working formula will find it stated and then immediately complicated. That is deliberate: the complication is the content. What is in the boxes Four kinds of set-off passage recur, and they carry most of the argument. A reconstruction carries out a calculation. Wherever this treatise makes a quantitative claim - that Ptolemy's equant is accurate to nine arcminutes for Mars, that Galileo's plank slowed the fall by a factor of fourteen, that Tycho's objection to Copernicus required every star to be a hundred solar diameters across - the calculation is done and the numbers are printed. They were computed for this book and can be checked. Where a historical figure's own number differs from the one the calculation gives, both are stated.

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