Newton's contribution to classical mechanics
Abstract Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was a well-known physicist and mathematician who made great contributions to natural science. His great work Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy is an important part of classical mechanics theory and an important milestone in the history of human development. This paper discusses his contribution to classical mechanics from Newton’s law of motion and the universal law of gravitation.
Key Words Newton, Classical mechanics, Newton’s law of motion, Law of universal gravitation
Introduction
Classical mechanics is an ancient subject. Since the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, people have been studying the motion of objects. Its theoretical system can be divided into two periods, vector mechanics and analytical mechanics. Galileo made a pioneering and great contribution to the establishment of vector mechanics, the most important of which is that he established the classical mechanics’ theory with solid and reliable scientific experiments. He came up with the correct theory of accelerated motion by putting a small ball on a ramp for quantitative tests. Newton, on the other hand, continued to study the scientific theories pioneered by Galileo, summarizing, and developing Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation. In Newton’s time, the “helio-centric” theory was first proposed by Copernicus. Based on Tycho’s observations, Kepler summarized Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. Force and acceleration were also defined by Galileo, and the physical laws related to inertia and free fall were proposed. Except, at that time, each physics and law of physics is independent of each other. Newton “stood on the shoulders of these great men”, comprehensively observed and studied the motion of the planets and objects on the earth and turned it into a complete system by mathematical methods, and was able to express the causal logic. As Newton said, “Natural philosophy should be called ‘physics,’ and its goal is to find the structure and behavior of nature, and to reduce it as far as possible to a universal law and law, to determine the law by observation and experiment, and from this to conclude the causal relationship.” This paper mainly summarizes Newton’s main contribution to classical mechanics, including his book The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (hereinafter referred to as Principia) and Newton’s laws of motion and universal law of gravitation.
An epoch-making masterpiece – Principia
Principia is considered by scientists to be one of the greatest books in the history of science (Steele). Newton built on the work of his predecessors in his magnum opus Principia, which was published in 1687. The title “natural philosophy” is because physics was called natural philosophy at the time, and the classical mechanics he was discussing was an important part of physics. The word “mathematics” is used to emphasize the strict mathematical relations in mechanics. This book is not the culmination of the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, but also a milestone in the progress and development of human civilization. This book not only summarizes and promotes Newton and all the major achievements of physics before him but also becomes the model of scientific research in the future. It is the product and crystallization of the historical development of astronomy, mathematics, and mechanics. At the same time, he also inherited and developed the previous scientific method, the “induction-deduction” method. The publication of the book marked the establishment of the classical mechanics’ system and established an immortal monument in the history of science.
Principia is divided into two main parts. In the first part, Newton first elaborated several important concepts, such as mass, external force, centripetal force, inertia, time, space, and so on, and on this basis gave Newton’s three laws of motion, and on this basis put forward such as the synthesis and decomposition of force, momentum conservation, movement of the center of mass and other theorems. In this section, Newton’s second and third laws are given proper scientific and mathematical treatment. This is different from previous attempts to explain similar phenomena, where experiments were either incomplete, incorrect, or without precise mathematical expressions. But Newton was different, he gave a more complete expression. Newton also showed how the law of conservation of momentum and angular momentum works. This part is not much, but it is the foundation of the whole book. The second part is about the application of these theorems and laws. He used deductive reasoning to get the very important law of gravitation; The damping motion, hydrodynamics, and hydrostatics are discussed. According to the discovered laws, the cosmic system was explained, and the observed celestial data were analyzed, such as the determination of the orbit of the satellite around the planet, the planet around the sun, and the comet. At the same time, the free fall and projectile motion of the object on the ground were observed and analyzed, and the movement of the surface and the celestial body were combined for the first time. The combination of Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation provided the most complete and accurate description of classical mechanics, and he proved that these laws apply to celestial bodies as well as everyday objects.
Although Principia has many limitations, such as the introduction of “absolute time”, “absolute space” and other concepts, and only applies to the macro slow-speed world, it laid the foundation for the development of physics, it is a great scientific work.
Newton’s three laws of motion
Newton’s First Law of Motion: A body at rest persists in its state of rest, and a body in motion remains in constant motion along a straight line unless acted upon by an external force.
Newton’s Second Law of Motion: A body’s acceleration is directly proportional to the force exerted on it and is in the same direction as the force.
Newton’s Third Law of Motion: To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Newton’s three laws of motion have now become widely accepted by scientists as macroscopic laws of nature, and they are the basis for inferences.
Newton’s first law of motion
The first law is based on the experiments of Galileo and Descartes on the inertial motion. Galileo used the inclined plane experiment, if a small ball from any place on the inclined plane rolled down, under ideal conditions, it can never stop rolling. Later, Descartes further studied this ideal experiment, developing the “never-ending roll” into a straight-line motion in space. Based on the above research, Newton came up with Newton’s first law and proposed that inertia is the original property of objects. For physicists today, it is almost the foundation of mechanics.
Newton’s second law of motion
The second law is a development of Galileo’s idea of dynamics after defining the concepts of mass, velocity, and acceleration. The second law is closely related to the first law. While the first law states that an object moves at rest or in a straight line with constant velocity with no external force or zero combined force, the second law states that an external force only changes the state of motion of the object. This overturned the previous misconception that force was required to maintain a body in motion. Newton’s statement of the second law shows that his original statement of the second law was not about the relationship between force and acceleration, but about the relationship between force and “change of motion”. The “change of motion” in this case is actually the change in momentum over time, while the acceleration is the rate of change of velocity. Newton’s second law plays an important role in Newton’s laws of motion and has a wide range of applications. Newton’s second law holds true for a force, whether electromagnetic or mechanical, for the mass of an object, whether it is the mass of a nuclear particle or a star, and for small or large accelerations.
Newton’s third law of motion
It has been proven many times that “two objects, when colliding head-on, both move in the same way and, therefore, their movements and reactions are the same.” From this it can be seen that the third law is based on the phenomenon of collision, and its quantified results are obtained by the equal amount of motion of the collision phenomenon.
The third law summarizes the concept of force comprehensively and states that each force has its own reaction. Collision is the basic phenomenon on which the third law is based. His collision experiment assumes that air resistance has been excluded, and through repeated arguments, it is concluded that when “two objects collide head-on, they produce a change of motion of the same magnitude in the opposite direction of their own motion, so that their action and reaction are always the same”. It can be seen that the collision phenomenon is the basis of Newton’s third law, and its quantitative results are derived from the equal amount of motion of the collision phenomenon. In other words, because two objects touch each other after the change in their respective momentum is the same, and because the length of time used is the same, so the conclusion is drawn that the action and reaction forces are equal. The formulation of the third law has led to a better understanding of the interaction between objects and revealed the internal structure of the natural unity of opposites.
Newton’s law of universal gravitation
“Every particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force that is directly proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.”
Newton’s proof of gravity theory indicates that Gravity is an interaction between two objects, and the magnitudes of the forces between these two objects are the same. Moreover, the context of Newton’s third law of motion is that If two bodies exert forces on each other, these forces have the same magnitude but in opposite directions (Thornton and Marion). To some degree, Newton’s proof of gravity theory proves Newton’s third law of motion.
The law of gravitation is an important historic discovery. It laid the scientific foundation of astronomical motion, used the theory of gravitation, people discovered Neptune, Pluto, and other objects, and explained many terrestrial and celestial phenomena such as Halley’s comet. It also reveals one of the most basic forms of interaction between objects – gravity. Based on the previous inverse square theorem of gravity, he connected the force with the mass of an object and applied the law of reaction to generalize the law of universal gravitation. This law has been proved by numerous experiments, is the world-recognized scientific law, and is one of the most important laws.
Conclusion
The classical mechanical system takes absolute space, absolute time, mass, and force as the basic elements, centers on the three laws of motion, take the law of gravity as a whole, and describes the motion law of objects in the form of calculus. His logic is strict, the structure is tight, and through observation and experiment, formed a complete scientific system. The establishment of classical mechanics laid a solid foundation for the development of the whole natural science, established the basic concepts and basic laws of mechanics, made mechanics become a systematic and theoretical knowledge system, and gradually mature and perfect. It makes people’s description of the motion state of the object improve from the result of a change to the understanding of the process of change. The unification of the motions of heaven and earth brought about the first great synthesis of man’s knowledge of nature; Let people’s understanding of mechanical motion from kinematics to dynamics. Classical mechanics not only describes the motion of objects but also reveals the causes of their motion, thus allowing people to understand how things move and explain why they move, thus deepening their understanding of nature. However, it also has inherent limitations: it is only effective under macro low-speed conditions. Once the phenomenon of microparticles or objects moving close to the speed of light is produced, classical mechanics cannot make an effective and reasonable explanation. Although the motion of objects in the microcosmic world is explained by quantum mechanics, and the description of objects in high-speed motion is solved by the use of relativity, classical mechanics can still explain most of the daily phenomena in life. At the same time, classical mechanics did not launch the stage of history because of the proposal of relativity and quantum mechanics. Today, satellites, space travel, and so on are inseparable from classical mechanics. Ancient classical mechanics in the new era, are once again full of vitality.
Newton was a well-known mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. He collected the achievements of all the pioneers in the field of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With the publication of Principia as the mark, he used a unified theory to explain the motion state and law of all objects and gave a correct and clear explanation of how objects move under the condition of macroscopic low speed. This is the first major synthesis of natural science in human history. In addition, differential equations and differential equations created by Newton in mathematics also provided important tools for the development of natural sciences in the future, thus opening a new era of physics and mathematics. Of course, although Newton made great contributions in the early stage, later, he classified these inexplicable phenomena into the field of theology, and spent the second half of his life, completing 1.5 million words of theological works. However, Newton’s establishment of classical mechanical proposals and his methods of doing research propelled the rapid development of physics in the 18th and 19th centuries, helping to better the study of the natural sciences, until quantum mechanics and relativity were established. His scientific achievements and ideas not only greatly promoted the academic and ideological circles at that time, but also changed society to some extent, profoundly affected the development of modern science and technology and social development, made great progress in modern society, and made outstanding contributions to the development of all mankind in the world.
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