"These independent objects of Newtonian physics might move, touch each other, collide, or even, by a certain stretch of the imagination, act at a distance: but nothing could penetrate them except in the limited way that light penetrated translucent substances. This world of separate bodies, unaffected by the accidents of history or geographic location, underwent a profound change with the elaboration of the new concepts of matter and energy that went forward from Faraday and von Mayer through Clerk-Maxwell and Willard Gibbs and Ernest Mach to Planck and Einstein. The discovery that solids, liquids, and gases were phases of all forms of matter modified the very conceptions of substance, while the identification of electricity, light, and heat as aspects of a protean energy, and the final break-up of "solid" matter into particles of this same ultimate energy lessened the gap, not merely between various aspects of the physical world, but between the mechanical and the organic. Both matter in the raw and the more organized and internally self-sustaining organisms could be described as systems of energy in more or less stable, more or less complex, states of equilibrium."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934) Ch.8 "Orientation"
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Classical_mechanics
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Classical mechanics
21 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Classical mechanics →
Related Quotes
"Wave functions, probabilities, quantum tunneling, the ceaseless roiling energy fluctuations of the vacuum, the smeari…"
"In Newton's time only two kinds of force were available for quantitative investigation. One was the force of gravity;…"
"However far the phenomena transcend the scope of classical physical explanation, the account of all evidence must be …"
"A law explains a set of observations; a theory explains a set of laws. The quintessential illustration of this jump i…"
"From the thick darkness of the middle ages man's struggling spirit emerged as in new birth; breaking out of the iron …"
"Newton then elevates this approximate empirical discovery to the position of a rigorous principle, the principle of i…"
"... Inertia resists acceleration, but acceleration relative to what? Within the frame of classical mechanics the only…"
"Although many historians of the new millennium now take issue with the notion of a Scientific Revolution, it is gener…"
"I mentally conceive of some moveable [sphere] projected on a horizontal plane, all impediments being put aside. Now i…"
"On the authority of Aristotle... motion in the planetary world was somehow directed by the more perfect motion in hig…"