Mechanics and Experimental Physics
Mechanics and Experimental Physics
复制标题
力学与实验物理
DOI：
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发表时间：
2003
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
R. Home
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
R. Home
老式的科学史把科学的发展描述为新知识的逐渐增加，并把很多注意力放在确定发现的时间和由谁做出的，对18世纪的物理学几乎没有分配多少篇幅。尽管一些有趣的发现，特别是与电学有关的发现得到了承认，但与在此之前和之后的物理认识的戏剧性进步时期相比，这一时期通常被认为是一个休休期。最近，由于历史学家对他们的任务采取了一种不那么局限的观点，18世纪的物理学开始被人们以一种更有利的眼光看待：在这一时期，物理学成为了一个与我们今天所知的领域非常相似的领域。传统上所理解的物理学不是一门实验科学，它的研究对象也不像今天这样。在整个欧洲的大学里，物理学都是作为“自然哲学”来教授的，这与它的名字来源于希腊语φ <s:1> σιζ的意思是一致的，也就是说，作为一般处理“自然”的哲学标准本科课程的一部分。主要关注的是广泛的原则，而不是特定的自然效果，首先是身体的性质和决定自然变化的条件。几个世纪以来，亚里士多德的著作《物理学》、《论生命》、《生成与腐败》、《气象学》和《论动物》一直是标准文本，在我们这个时代开始的时候，在许多地方还在使用这些著作，尽管在之前的一个半世纪里，知识分子的观点发生了巨大的变化。
Older-style histories of science that depicted the growth of science as a gradual accretion of new knowledge, and that devoted much attention to identifying when discoveries were made and by whom, allocated little space to the physics of the eighteenth century. Although some interesting discoveries, especially in relation to electricity, were acknowledged, the period was generally presented as a fallow one compared with the periods of dramatic advance in physical understanding that preceded and followed it. More recently, as historians have adopted a less restricted view of their task, eighteenth-century physics has come to be seen in a more favorable light: as the period when physics became a field recognizably like the one we know today. Physics as traditionally understood was not an experimental science, and neither was its subject matter the same as it is today. Consistent with the meaning of the Greek word φυσιζ from which it drew its name, physics was taught in universities throughout Europe as “natural philosophy,” that is, as the part of the standard undergraduate course in philosophy dealing with “nature” in general. The primary concern was with broad principles rather than particular natural effects, and above all with the nature of body and the conditions determining natural change. Everywhere for several centuries the Aristotelian treatises Physica, De caelo, De generatione et corruptione, Meteorologica , and De anima were the standard texts, and in many places they were still being used at the start of our period, notwithstanding the dramatic changes in intellectual outlook that had occurred during the preceding century and a half.