Rational mechanics of materials

Abstract

In all of natural philosophy, the most deeply and repeatedly studied part, next to pure geometry, is mechanics. The resurgence of rational mechanics, after half a century’s drowsing, has signalled and led the rediscovery of natural philosophy as a whole, just beginning in our time. For two hundred years, the fields of scientific research were wilfully shrunk and sharpened to pin-point size, and appropriate microscopes were developed so that organized micro-thought could split them into forklets of microscience, now budgeted at rates in megabucks per kilohour. Opening one’s eyes to the daylight after having been trained to distrust anything seen without squinting is not easy. As during Rip van Winkle’s dream, the perceptible spectrum of nature has changed while we crept into ever deeper and darker corners, but it has not narrowed. To see it again, we need the telescope of generality, but looking through the wrong end of the microscope of ever finer subdivision will give us a worse picture of nature than was seen by the alert, unaided eye in the seventeenth century or may be learned today from the comic strips called “science for the layman”.