Abstract
This epilogue briefly summarizes the foregoing essays while emphasizing the ways in which this critical perusal was approached, and what appears to be the large themes that received a special magnification and, perhaps, a biased presentation. It underlines the main breakthroughs as well as the secondary ones. It highlights the role of scientists who left essential prints in this history of scientific ideas. It finally outlines the observed timid beginnings of future theories of coupled fields in thermo-mechanics.
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Notes
- 1.
If we compare the examined period with the one considered in our previous book [13] which included the two World Wars of the twentieth century, we find that this was a relatively quiet one. Of course there were wars. An important one, very much similar to World War One in extent and casualties was the Seven-Years war (known as the French and Indian War in the USA) that included England, the Netherlands, and Prussia on one side and France, Austria, Russia, and Sweden on the other with battle fields on three continents (Europe, India, North and Central America) and various seas. It lasted from 1756 to the Treatise of Paris in 1763. This date marks the true birth of a powerful British Empire and the disappearance of French possessions in India and North America (Canada, East of the Mississippi river; the rest of Louisiana, west of the Mississippi river, from New Orleans to the Canadian boarder was sold to the USA by Napoleon in 1803), but with a status quo in Europe. Other conflicts were the Napoleonic wars, the wars of independence in Italy and Greece, the British-Russian war, and the French-Prussian war of 1870, and of course the war of independence in the USA and the unfortunate American Civil War in 1861–1865. But all these did not alter much the scientific world where international exchanges (e.g., between England and France or France and Germany) continued uninterrupted except in case of physical impossibility (e.g., during a blockade). This is in sharp contrast with what happened in the twentieth century. The great influential event in fact was the French Revolution started in 1789, not because “it did not need savants”, [Supposedly, this is what was said by some philistine revolutionaries when the chemist Lavoisier lost his head (but he was not executed because he was a scientist. Remember that Laplace, Lagrange, Monge, Coulomb, Lazare Carnot and others went through this period without physical damage; d’Alembert had died of natural causes in 1783).] but because it instituted a new type of framework for scientific studies with the creation of engineering (polytechnic) schools, a model that was to spread all over the world during the nineteenth century. This was particularly beneficial to the advances in continuum mechanics and its application to mechanical and civil engineering along with implementation of good mathematics (sometimes created for this very purpose) as illustrated by Cauchy, Navier, Fourier, Ampère, Fresnel, Coriolis, Duhamel, Saint-Venant, Poincaré, etc., in France and the disciples of F. Neumann (Kirchhoff, Clebsch, and Voigt) in Germany.
- 2.
The inequalities to be satisfied by viscosity coefficients in order to guarantee a non-negative dissipation, were in fact proved belatedly by Duhem toward the end of the nineteenth century.
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Maugin, G.A. (2014). Epilogue. In: Continuum Mechanics Through the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Solid Mechanics and Its Applications, vol 214. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05374-5_13
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