Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Mechanics
T is a common complaint that though the principles Of Mechanics are the simplest and the earliest to be discovered in the whole range of Science, and moreover are directly illustrated in almost every act of our lives, more difficulty is found in giving beginners a real grip of them than with any other branch of Physics.
This I attribute largely to the way in which the text-books deal with the subject. The student usually Opens the book upon a chapter in which such leading concepts as matter, force, mass, particle, rigid body, smooth body are treated in definitions of a line or two each, before he sees any reason for their introduction at all. He is probably warned that philosophers are not agreed about the nature of matter; that motion is purely relative; that force is a misleading idea borrowed from our muscular sensations and better got rid of; and that no such things as mathematical particles, rigid bodies and smooth bodies exist in nature. He naturally concludes that Mechanics is an abstruse subject having nothing to do with realities or common sense.
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