D’Alembert, Euler and Rational Mechanics: What Mechanics Does Not Tell Us about the World
speaker: Stephen Gaukroger (University of Sydney/University of Aberdeen)abstract: Rational mechanics was a reworking of Newtonian mechanics in terms of very powerful new mathematical resources, which came to a head in the mid to late eighteenth century. With the collapse of mechanist aspirations to provide a theory that would reduce all of physics to the mechanically-characterized interactions between micro-corpuscles, rational mechanics became caught up in a similarly foundational project, albeit one pursed by very different means. There were two components to the project. The first was that the core of rational mechanics consisted of a priori truths. The second was that all of physics was basically mechanics. I focus on the second set of claims, looking at the cases of gravitation and optics, with a view to showing that the gulf between mechanics and physics more generally was unbridgeable.
timetable:
Wed 15 Sep, 16:30 - 18:00, Sala Conferenze Centro De Giorgi
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