Classical Mechanics: One Hundred Years After

大约在1910年之后，大多数哲学家和物理学家的注意力从经典物理学中关于连续的基本不确定性——即连续延伸的、可弯曲的物体，如电线、板或流体——转移到量子力学和相对论提出的新难题上。由于各种各样的外来原因，20世纪的物理学家开始把质点这个特殊的学科看作是构成了所有“经典力学”的组成部分，尽管他们19世纪的大多数前辈并不认同这种反连续统的观点。与连续统一体相比，质点呈现出相对较少的概念问题，“经典力学”意义的现代转变导致许多当代哲学家和历史学家误解了19世纪苦苦挣扎的概念问题。与此同时，本世纪有许多关于经典扩展体行为的工作正在进行，主要是由工程师和应用数学家进行的。这些研究让我们对19世纪完全未知的经典思维方式的结构和有效性范围有了很多了解。不幸的是，尽管科学哲学家不断地引用“从经典理论中学到的教训”，但大多数哲学家并没有跟上这一主题的新知识。这个项目的目的是根据二十世纪的力学研究，重新审视一些在今天的哲学论证中继续发挥关键作用的核心历史事件，包括为什么这么多经典物理学家认为科学在其过程中需要内在的“理想化”或“反现实”；杜昂阐明著名的奎因-杜昂论题的动机；促使他拒绝原子模型的考虑；期望一组公理能充分涵盖我们通常认为的“经典力学”是否合理？

After 1910 or so, the attention of most philosophers and physicists shifted from the foundational uncertainties of the classical physics of continua-that is, continuously extended, flexible objects such as wires, plates, or fluids-to the novel puzzles raised by quantum mechanics and relativity. For various extraneous reasons, twentieth-century physicists began to see the special subject of point masses as comprising all of `classical mechanics,` although this anti-continuum view would not have been shared by most of their nineteenth-century forebears. Compared to continua, point masses present relatively few conceptual problems, and the modern shift in the meaning of `classical mechanics` has led many contemporary philosophers and historians to misunderstand the conceptual problems with which the nineteenth century struggled. At the same time, there has been much ongoing work on the behavior of classical extended bodies in this century, conducted largely by engineers and applied mathematicians. These investigations have taught us much about the structure and range of validity of classical ways of thinking that were completely unknown in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, although philosophers of science continually cite `the lessons to be learned from classical theory,` most philosophers have not kept current with new knowledge on the topic. The purpose of this project is to reexamine, in the light of twentieth-century research on mechanics, a number of central historical episodes that continue to play pivotal roles in philosophical argumentation today, including the reasons why so many classical physicists believed that science needs to be inherently `idealized` or otherwise `anti-realistic` in its procedures; Duhem's motives in articulating the famed Quine-Duhem thesis; the considerations that motivated his rejection of atomistic modeling; whether it is reasonable to expect that a single set of axioms can adequately cover all of what we usually regard as `classical mechanics.`