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Zusatztext ... interesting, thorough, well-documented and well-presented. Informationen zum Autor Jesper Lützen is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Copenhagen. Klappentext This book presents an analysis of Heinrich Hertz's posthumously published 'Principles of Mechanics' in its philosophical, physical and mathematical context. It is the first book to comprehensively examine Hertz's important ideas on mechanics and the author draws on the original manuscripts to reveal the creative process of Hertz throughout the writing of his book. Zusammenfassung This book gives an analysis of Hertz's posthumously published Principles of Mechanics in its philosophical, physical and mathematical context. In a period of heated debates about the true foundation of physical sciences, Hertz's book was conceived and highly regarded as an original and rigorous foundation for a mechanistic research program. Insisting that a law-like account of nature would require hypothetical unobservables, Hertz viewed physical theories as (mental) images of the world rather than the true design behind the phenomena. This paved the way for the modern conception of a model. Rejecting the concept of force as a coherent basic notion of physics he built his mechanics on hidden masses (the ether) and rigid connections, and formulated it as a new differential geometric language.Recently many philosophers have studied Hertz's image theory and historians of physics have discussed his forceless mechanics. The present book shows how these aspects, as well as the hitherto overlooked mathematical aspects, form an integrated whole which is closely connected to the mechanistic world view of the time and which is a natural continuation of Hertz's earlier research on electromagnetism. Therefore it is also a case study of the strong interactions between philosophy, physics and mathematics. Moreover, the book presents an analysis of the genesis of many of the central elements of Hertz's mechanics based on his manuscripts and drafts. Hertz's research program was cut short by the advent of relativity theory but its image theory influenced many philosophers as well as some physicists and mathematicians and its geometric form had a lasting influence on advanced expositions of mechanics. Inhaltsverzeichnis 1: Introduction 2: The principles of mechanics before Hertz 3: Mechanization of physics 4: The concept of force 5: A biographical survey 6: Hertz's road to mechanics 7: Images of nature 8: Hertz's earlier ideas about images 9: Images of mechanics 10: Kantianism. A priori and empirical elements of images 11: Time, space and mass 12: The line element: the origin of the Massenteilchen 13: Hertz's geometry of systems of points 14: Vector quantities and their components 15: Connections. Material systems 16: The fundamental law 17: Free systems 18: Cyclic coordinates 19: Unfree systems. Forces 20: Cyclic and conservative systems 21: Integral principles 22: A history of non-holonomic constraints 23: Hertz on the Hamiltonian formalism 24: Mathematicians on the geometrization of the Hamilton-Jacobi formalism 25: Hertz on the domain of applicability of his mechanics 26: Force-producing models 27: Reception, extension and impact 28: List of conclusions A: Appendix ...
