Abstract
Newton’s great achievement in creating the science of mechanics was to develop quantitative relationships between the forces acting on an object and the changes in the object’s motion. More than that, he declared that the main task of mechanics was to learn about forces from observed motions. But this does not alter the fact that the idea of force exists independently of the quantitative laws of motion and comes initially from very subjective experiences—the muscular effort involved in applying a push or a pull. We shall begin from this point of view, and rather than plunge at once into dynamics, we shall first take a look at forces in balance.
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© 1986 A.P.French and M.G.Ebison
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French, A.P., Ebison, M.G. (1986). Forces. In: Introduction to CLASSICAL MECHANICS. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4119-9_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4119-9_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-0-412-38140-9
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-4119-9
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