Concept

Mechanics

Overview

Mechanics (from Ancient Greek μηχανική (mēkhanikḗ) 'of machines') is the area of physics concerned with the relationships between force, matter, and motion among physical objects. Forces applied to objects may result in displacements, which are changes of an object's position relative to its environment.

Theoretical expositions of this branch of physics have their origins in Ancient Greece, for instance, in the writings of Aristotle and Archimedes (see History of classical mechanics and Timeline of classical mechanics). During the early modern period, scientists such as Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Christiaan Huygens, and Isaac Newton laid the foundation for what is now known as classical mechanics.

In the 20th century the concepts of classical mechanics were challenged by new discoveries, leading to fundamentally new approaches including relativistic mechanics and quantum mechanics.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Mechanics is discussed.

Why have the continental savants who have sought to get out of the ruts of their predecessors been usually unable to free themselves completely? On the other hand, if the principles of mechanics are only of experimental origin, are they not therefore only approximate and provisional? Might not new experiments some day lead us to modify or even to abandon them?
Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science
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For Mechanics proves--so Erdmann confidently continues--that rigidity must hold, not merely as to ratios, in the above restricted geometrical sense, but as to absolute magnitudes (p. 62). Hence we get at last true Congruence, empirical as Mechanics is empirical, and impossible to prove apart from Mechanics. I have already criticized Helmholtz's view of the dependence of Geometry on Mechanics, and need not here speak…
Bertrand Russell, An essay on the foundations of geometry
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The exclusive application of the measure of mechanics to processes which are of chemical and organic nature and by which, it is true, the laws of mechanics are also manifested, but are pushed into the background by other higher laws, this application is the cause of the peculiar, but, considering the times, unavoidable, narrowmindedness of the French materialism.
Friedrich Engels, Feuerbach
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Turn next to the Abstract-Concrete sciences. On the application of the simplest of these, Mechanics, depends the success of modern manufactures. The properties of the lever, the wheel-and-axle, etc., are recognised in every machine, and to machinery in these times we owe all production. Trace the history of the breakfast-roll.
Herbert Spencer, Essays on education and kindred subjects
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And here, also, we have to notice the important fact that, in the very process of being brought jointly to bear upon astronomical problems, they are themselves raised to a higher phase of development. For it was in dealing with the questions raised by celestial dynamics that the then incipient infinitesimal calculus was unfolded by Newton and his continental successors; and it was from inquiries into the mechanics…
Herbert Spencer, Illustrations of Universal Progress
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Mechanics

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Mechanics

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