The mechanical program for describing nature, put forward in ancient atomism, was most fully realized in the classical mechanics of Galileo-Newton, with the formation of which the scientific stage of the study of nature begins.
The formation of scientific views on the structure of matter dates back to the 16th century, when G. Galileo laid the foundation for the first physical picture of the world in the history of science - mechanical. He developed a methodology for a new way of describing nature - scientific-theoretical. Its essence is that only some physical and geometric characteristics stood out and became the subject of scientific research. Selection individual characteristics object made it possible to build theoretical models and test them under scientific experiment conditions. This methodological concept of Galileo became decisive in the development of all classical natural science.
I. Newton, relying on the works of Galileo, developed a strict scientific theory of mechanics, which also describes the movement celestial bodies, and the movement of earthly objects by the same laws. Within the framework of the mechanical picture of the world of Newton and his followers, matter was considered as a material substance consisting of individual particles - atoms and corpuscles.
Space, in which matter is located, was three-dimensional and described by Euclidean geometry, it is absolute, constant and always at rest.
Time was represented as a quantity independent of either space or matter.
It was believed that everything physical processes can be subjected to the laws of mechanics. Movement was considered as movement in space along continuous trajectories in accordance with the laws of mechanics. And all physical phenomena boiled down to movement material points.
The philosophical justification for the mechanical understanding of nature was given by R. Descartes, who believed that the world can be described completely objectively, without taking into account the human observer (the concept of absolute duality, i.e. the independence of thought and matter).
Newton's concept of space and time, on the basis of which the physical picture of the world was built, turned out to be dominant until late XIX V.
Space was considered infinite, flat, “rectilinear”, Euclidean. Its metric properties were described by Euclid's geometry. It was considered as absolute, empty, homogeneous and isotropic (there are no designated points and directions) and acted as a “container” of material bodies, as an inertial system independent of them.
Time was understood as absolute, homogeneous, uniformly flowing. It is immediately and everywhere throughout the Universe “uniform and synchronous” and acts as a process of duration independent of material objects. Classical mechanics reduced time to duration, fixing the defining property of time “to show the duration of an event.” (Aksenov G.P. About the cause of time // Questions of Philosophy. – 1996. – No. 1, p. 43).
The value of time indications in mechanics was considered absolute, independent of the state of motion of the body of reference.
Image of the Universe in this regard, it seemed to be a gigantic mechanism, where events and processes represent a chain of interconnected causes and effects. Hence the belief that it is theoretically possible to accurately reconstruct any past situation in the Universe or predict the future with absolute certainty. I. R. Prigogine called this belief in predictability “the fundamental myth of classical science.”
IN general outline The scientific picture of the 19th century presented the Universe as equilibrium and unchangeable with an infinite lifetime, in which random local disturbances of observed nonequilibrium formations with a noticeable organization of structures (galaxies, planetary systems, etc.) are quite likely.
This “picture of the world”, the appearance of life on our planet, was considered an unnatural phenomenon or artifact(“artificially made”), as a “deviation” in the existence of the Universe, as a temporary phenomenon and not connected with the rest of the cosmos.
The mechanical approach to describing nature turned out to be unusually fruitful. On the basis of Newtonian mechanics, hydrodynamics, the theory of elasticity, the mechanical theory of heat, the molecular kinetic theory and a number of other theories were created. Physics as a science has achieved enormous success in its development and has taken a leading position among other sciences.
The scientific work of I. Newton belongs to the 17th and 18th centuries.
The Age of Enlightenment is a time when capitalism qualitatively transformed the nature of activity and the type of communication of people.
The individual value of the producer’s personality is replaced by the value of the things he produces. Among the achievements of the bourgeois era is the creation of a single world market and universal public relations. History becomes global, the individual experience of a person is enriched by the socio-historical experience of not only his country, but also of all humanity; a person becomes a bearer of world-historical experience.
Needs for the development of industrial production and related technical progress form the need for the accumulation of objective knowledge about the world. This completes the formation objective prerequisites new scientific revolution. The only thing left was genius, which could, based on these premises, form a fundamentally new physical picture of the world. This task was completed by one of the greatest scientists in the history of mankind - Isaac Newton
His scientific heritage is multifaceted: the creation of differential and integral calculus; astronomical discoveries (thanks to telescopes built by him); Numerous studies in the field of optics.
However, Newton was immortalized by his creation of classical mechanics and the formation of a holistic and systematic mechanistic picture of the world. As a result, most of the characteristics of the Aristotelian picture of the world lost their significance, and fundamentally different qualities of natural objects received scientific justification.
Food for thought
Age of Enlightenment proclaims the dominance of the “age of Reason” and forms the belief that the subject of natural scientific knowledge are natural phenomena that are entirely subject to mechanical laws determined by cause-and-effect relationships. It was at this time that the ideals of rationalism were formed.
The task of natural science is to determine quantitatively measurable parameters natural phenomena and establishing functional dependencies between them, expressed through strict mathematical language. Under these conditions, mechanics comes out on top among natural sciences.
Newton's system of knowledge about nature is called classical physical picture of the world. Here are its main provisions.
1. In contrast to Aristotelian speculation, this is experimental picture of the world. Newton directly called his scientific program “experimental philosophy,” emphasizing the crucial importance of scientific experiment in the study of nature. His main reproach against the Cartesian “vortex” hypothesis was that Descartes did not appeal to experience, but constructed “deceptive assumptions” to explain nature. “I do not invent hypotheses,” Newton declared, but not in the sense that hypotheses are not needed for science. Hypotheses should not be “invented” (invented), but carefully substantiated.
Expert opinion
In 1687, the main work of I. Newton was published "Mathematical principles of natural philosophy", which laid the foundations of modern theoretical physics. Assessing this event, a prominent physicist of the 20th century. S.I. Vavilov wrote:
“In the history of natural science there was no event greater than the appearance "Began" Newton. The reason was that this book summed up everything that had been done over the previous millennia in the doctrine of the simplest forms of motion of matter. The complex vicissitudes of the development of mechanics, physics and astronomy, expressed in the names of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, were absorbed and replaced by brilliant clarity and harmony "Started" K
In the great work “Mathematical principles of natural philosophy”
he substantiated the method of “beginnings”, or “principles”: “It would be desirable to deduce from the principles of mechanics and other natural phenomena, reasoning in a similar way, for many things force me to assume that all these phenomena are determined by certain forces with which the particles of bodies, due to reasons, as yet unknown, either tend to each other and interlock into regular figures, or they mutually repel and move away from each other. Since these forces are unknown, until now the attempts of philosophers to explain natural phenomena have remained fruitless. I hope, however, that either this method of reasoning, or another, more correct one, the reasons presented here will provide some illumination.”
- 2. Monistic a picture of the world that described both the movement of celestial bodies and the movement of terrestrial objects using the same laws.
- 3. Corpuscular picture of the world, since matter was considered as a material substance consisting of individual corpuscles - “solid, weighty, impenetrable, moving particles.”
- 4. Mechanistic a picture of the world based on the laws of motion formulated by Newton. Initially there were five, then the number of laws was reduced to three. Nature was viewed as a complex mechanical system.
Newton's first law of mechanics - discovered by Galileo principle of inertia: any body is in a state of rest or uniform and rectilinear motion until, until the forces applied to it force it to change this state. However, this law cannot be considered a “new formulation” of Galileo’s principle, because Galileo developed earthly mechanics, and Newton elevated his laws to the rank of universal laws of the Cosmos.
The second law - the central law of mechanics - records the fact that acceleration, acquired by the body under the influence of some force, turns out to be directly proportional to this acting force and inversely proportional to the mass of the moving body.
Newton's first law can be obtained from the second, since in the absence of influence on the body from other bodies, its acceleration is zero.
According to the third law There is always an equal and opposite reaction to an action, in other words, the interactions of two bodies on each other are equal and directed opposite to each other.
These forces are applied to different material points (bodies), always act in pairs and are forces of the same nature.
With the creation of Newton's “method of fluxions” (the foundations of differential and integral calculus), the laws of mechanics made it possible to mathematically describe any type of motion - both uniform and uneven, both rectilinear and non-rectilinear.
5. Gravitational world system. Newton's law universal gravity argued that all bodies, since they have mass, experience mutual attraction. The force of such attraction is directly proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
This universal law of nature served as the basis for the formation of celestial mechanics, which studies the movement of bodies in the Solar System. This is the first time that natural science has reached such a scale of generalization. This completed the stage of transformation of the Aristotelian picture of the world that was begun by Copernicus. Before this, the dominant idea was of the Universe as a collection of spheres controlled by a prime mover or angels on the orders of God. Now Newton's concept of the mechanism of interconnection of gravitating masses, operating on the basis of a simple natural law, has been established.
However, Nyotoi always emphasized that the law of universal gravitation establishes only the quantitative dependence of the force of gravity on the magnitude of the gravitating masses and the distances between them; establishment causes He considered gravity a matter of further research.
6. Picture absolute space and time. In the Newtonian world, the three-dimensional space of Euclidean geometry (absolute, constant, always at rest) dominates, in which all material bodies are located. Time is an absolute quantity, independent of space and matter. It flows monotonously and synchronously throughout the Universe, speaking duration process regardless of events.
Movement was considered as movement in space along continuous trajectories over time in accordance with the laws of mechanics. It was believed that all physical processes can be reduced to moving material points under the influence of gravitational force, which is long-range.
7. Absolutely deterministic picture of the world. Its result is the image of the Universe as a gigantic and completely deterministic mechanism (like a complex clockwork), in which events and processes represent a chain of necessary interdependent causes and effects, excluding any chance. Since any clock mechanism requires a winding, Newton was forced to solve the problem of the “world's watchmaker.” This is the only function in his mechanics that was assigned to God: it was the divine “first push” that acted as the source of mechanical movement - God wound up the “universal clock”.
From such ideas flowed the belief that it was theoretically possible to accurately reconstruct any past situation in the Universe or predict the future with absolute certainty. This idea was most clearly expressed by the French scientist P. S. Laplace (1749-1827). Laplace determinism expresses the idea of absolute determinism - the confidence that everything that happens has a strictly defined cause (see task 6 in the Workshop).
Newton's ideas were not immediately accepted by all scientists. This is evidenced by the correspondence of two great physicists - Leibniz and Huygens. "Leibniz". I don't understand how Newton conceives of gravity or gravity. Apparently, in his opinion, this is nothing more than some inexplicable intangible quality.
Huygens“As for the reason for the tides that Newton gives, it does not satisfy me, like all his other theories based on the principle of attraction, which seems ridiculous and absurd to me.”
Newton's classical mechanics explains many physical phenomena and processes in terrestrial and extraterrestrial conditions, forms the basis for many technological advances. On its foundation, many methods of scientific research in various branches of natural science were formed. Until the beginning of the 20th century. dominated in science mechanistic worldview, according to which, all natural phenomena can be explained by the movements of particles and bodies.
Newton's authority was so strong that scientists working in other fields - astronomy, chemistry, etc. - tried to explain, based on the principles of mechanics, the most various phenomena nature. Thus, P.S. Laplace believed that any phenomena known at that time could be explained using the law of universal gravitation. He sought to create molecular mechanics
The mechanical picture of the world (M.K.M) is the first scientific picture of the world, a systematic scientific image of nature. The creators of M.K.M are Nicolas Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Rene Descartes and Isaac Newton. In 1543 543 Copernicus published an essay “On Rotations” celestial spheres", in it he outlined the theory heliocentric system of the world. This teaching, in the history of science, is a revolutionary act, since after it the independence of science from theology began. In 1584 Bruno published the book “On the Infinity of the Universe and Worlds,” in which he corrected the mistakes made by Copernicus, believing that the Sun is not at the center of the Universe, but is an ordinary ordinary star. He believed in the spread of life throughout the universe. In 1609 Galileo created a pipe for observing space objects. In 1610, with the help of this pipe, he discovered two satellites of Jupiter, established that the Milky Way consists of many stars, and discovered mountains and craters on the surface of the Moon. He was the first to establish the law of inertia and the principle of relativity of motion. In 1619 Kepler published the book “Harmony of the World,” in which he outlined the three laws of planetary motion and thereby established the structure of the solar system. In 1644 Descartes- philosopher, mathematician, physicist and astronomer published “Principles of Philosophy”. He set about creating a unified picture of the world. He imagined the solar system in the form of huge vortices. In Descartes' world there is nothing except infinite space and particles moving in it, in which there is no place reserved for God.
In 1686 Newton- the great English physicist, mathematician and astronomer, in his work “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” formulated three laws that underlie classical mechanics. Then Newton, based on the laws of planetary motion established by Kepler, discovered the law of universal gravitation.
M.K.M consists of moving bodies and emptiness, space is a container for bodies, and time– duration of processes. Space and time have no connection with each other and with the movement of material bodies. Space is infinite and unchanging in time. The movement of bodies occurs due to the “first push” of God. Aristotle believed that God rotates the firmament day and night, but Newton, based on the law of inertia, narrows the scope of God’s activity, freeing him from daily work. So, as we learned about the world, there was less room for God. Newton's world is a world once wound up as a kind of mechanism and launched into eternal times, like a wind-up watch.
All natural phenomena and processes are predetermined by Newton’s laws - this is what the French scientist believed Simon Laplace and developed mechanical determinism. However, the development of science has shown the inconsistency of Laplace's idea, since Newton's laws are true only in the macrocosm.
M.K.M has turned the multifaceted world into a colorless scheme, where there is nothing but moving bodies that have different initial conditions: speed and coordinates. This theory asserts the immutability of nature. Along it, the stars rested motionless in their places. Earth, its climate, the relief remained unchanged. The species of plants and animals were established once and for all. According to M.K.M, there is no fundamental difference between the micro- and macrocosm, and all cause-and-effect relationships were considered unambiguous and predetermined. IN mid-19th century a huge world of facts related to electrical and magnetic fields, qualitative change and development of natural objects that could not be explained from the position of MCM. As a result, this theory was abandoned, replacing it with an electromagnetic picture of the world.
1 Subsequent steps in creating a new picture of the world were made by the Italian scientist, one of the founders of exact natural science, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). Both of them were staunch followers of Copernicus. Galileo was the first to use a telescope of his own design for astronomical observations, discovering mountains on the Moon, i.e. discovering that the Moon does not have an ideal spherical shape, supposedly inherent only to bodies of “celestial nature,” but has a completely “earthly” nature. Thus, the idea, dating back to Aristotle, of the fundamental difference between “perfect” celestial bodies and imperfect earthly ones was shaken. Other astronomical discoveries of Galileo - the discovery of the four satellites of Jupiter (1610), the identification of the phases of Venus, the observation of spots on the Sun - had enormous ideological significance, confirming the material unity of the world. It was clearly shown that the Earth is not the only center around which all bodies must revolve. Finally, he proves that Milky Way consists of clusters of countless stars. These astronomical discoveries made a real revolution in astronomical science. This was important evidence in favor of the Copernican system of the world.Galileo Galilei also opposed Aristotle's mechanics and astronomy. He refuted Aristotle's teaching that heavy bodies fall faster than light ones. Studying the kinematics of the movement of bodies, he was the first to use the concept of inertia. According to the then dominant Aristotelian concept, the concept of inertia did not exist and it was believed that any movement, except natural, requires continuous impact, and the cessation of impact leads to the immediate cessation of movement. Galileo opposed this concept.
Using the concept of inertia, Galileo explained why the Earth, when revolving around the Sun and rotating on its axis, preserves both the atmosphere and everything that is in the atmosphere and on the earth's surface. Here the principle of relativity discovered by Galileo was manifested for mechanical phenomena, known as Galileo’s principle of relativity and stating that if the laws of mechanics are valid in one coordinate system, then they are valid in any other coordinate system moving rectilinearly and uniformly relative to the first, i.e. V inertial systems countdown. In another formulation, the law sounds like this: no experiments carried out in an inertial frame of reference can prove whether the frame of reference is at rest or moving! evenly and straight. All laws of mechanics in all inertial frames of reference manifest themselves in the same way; in them, space and time are absolute in nature, i.e. the time interval and sizes of bodies do not depend on the state of motion of the reference system.
Simultaneously with the law of inertia, Galileo also used another fundamental position of classical mechanics - the law of independence of the action of forces. He applied it to the movement of bodies in the Earth's gravity field.
In his philosophical views, based on natural scientific conclusions, Galileo stands on the position of the new mechanical natural philosophy he founded, mechanistic natural science.
It comes from the recognition of an infinite and eternal Universe, united everywhere. Argues that the celestial world consists of the same physical bodies as the Earth. All natural phenomena, in his opinion, obey the same laws of mechanics. Matter itself, as the real substance of things, consists of absolutely unchanging atoms (here Galileo relies on the atomism of Democritus); all its various manifestations are reduced to purely quantitative properties, therefore everything in nature can be measured and calculated; the movement of matter appears in a single, universal mechanical form. In all natural phenomena, according to Galileo, strict mechanical causality is revealed, therefore, finding the causes of phenomena and understanding their internal necessity is the main, true goal of science, the “highest level of knowledge.”
The source of knowledge, according to Galileo, is experience. He condemned scholasticism, divorced from reality and relying exclusively on authorities. Galileo's method of scientific research boiled down to establishing an assumption from observations and experiments - a hypothesis, the verification of which in practice is given by a physical law. In its main features this method became the method of natural science.
Before Galileo, physics and mathematics existed separately. He connected physics, which explains the nature and causes of movement, and mathematics, which makes it possible to describe this movement, i.e. formulate his law. As one of the founders of classical mechanics, Galileo took two fundamentally important steps: he turned to physical experience and connected physics with mathematics.
When developing his system of the world, Copernicus proceeded from the assumption that the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun in circular orbits. To explain the complex motion of the planets along the ecliptic, he had to introduce 48 epicycles into his system. And only thanks to the efforts of the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, the Copernican system of the world acquired a simple and harmonious appearance. Kepler took the next step - he discovered the elliptical shape of orbits and the three laws of planetary motion around the Sun. Kepler's first two laws were published in 1609, the third in 1619. The most important for understanding the general structure of the solar system was the first law, which stated that the planets revolve around the Sun in elliptical orbits, and the Sun is at the focus of one of these ellipses . At one time, the Greeks assumed that all celestial bodies should move in a circle, because a circle is the most perfect of all curves. Although the Greeks knew a lot about ellipses and their mathematical properties, they did not understand that celestial bodies could move in anything other than circles or complex combinations of circles. Kepler was the first to dare to express such an idea. His laws were of decisive importance in the history of science primarily because they contributed to the proof of Newton's law of gravitation.
Kepler insisted on a physical explanation of natural phenomena, did not recognize theological concepts (for example, he argued that comets are material bodies), as well as the anthropomorphic understanding of nature, endowing it with spirit-like powers, and opposed alchemists and astrologers.
Kepler's teaching about the laws of planetary motion was of great importance for the formation of the natural science picture of the world, i opened the way to the search for more general laws of mechanical motion of material bodies and systems.
In the works of contemporaries of Galileo and Kepler, the Italian physicist and mathematician Evangelista Torricelli (1608-1647) and the French mathematician, physicist and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) developed experimental physics. In addition to solving the problem of the motion of a body thrown at an angle to the horizontal, Torricelli was the first to experimentally prove the existence atmospheric pressure in experiments with tubes with mercury. Pascal went down in the history of physics as the author of the law on all-round uniform transmission of fluid pressure, the law of communicating vessels and the theory of the hydraulic press.
The formation and further development of mechanics depended on mathematical descriptions of physical laws, and in this direction it is necessary to highlight the work of the French scientist Rene Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes laid the foundations analytical geometry, applied its apparatus to describe the movement of bodies, developed the concepts of a variable quantity and function. In his Elements of Philosophy, published in 1644, Descartes formulated three laws of nature. The first two express the principle of inertia, the third formulates the law of conservation of momentum. In understanding the world, Descartes placed first place the insight of the mind. He believed that with the help logical reasoning you can build a picture of the world. The followers of Descartes were called Cartesians (Cartesius is the Latinized name of Descartes).
In Descartes' world, matter is identical to space, all space is filled with matter, there is no emptiness. Atoms are negated, matter is divisible to infinity. Descartes reduced all phenomena to mechanical movements. All interactions are carried out through pressure, collisions - some parts of matter press on others, push them. The whole world is filled with vortex movements (circular movements). The infinite divisibility of matter in Descartes is not entirely consistently combined with the existence of “particles of matter.” Descartes has three types of such particles: the omnipresent particles of the sky, the particles of fire and the particles of dense matter. Movement is produced by a force emanating from God. The same force divides continuous matter into parts and particles and is stored in them, being the source of their circular (vortex) motion, in which some particles are pushed out of their places by others.
The French scientist also played a great role in the development of astronomy; he considered the Universe as a self-developing system. Initially, it was in a chaotic state, then the movement of matter particles acquired the character of centrifugal vortex movements, as a result of which celestial bodies were formed, including the Sun and planets. Thus, the emergence of the solar system and the entire Universe occurs, according to Descartes, without divine intervention, on the basis of the laws of nature. “God so miraculously established these laws that even if we assume that he did not create anything other than what was said (i.e., matter and motion), and did not introduce any order, any proportionality into matter, but, on the contrary, left only the most unimaginable chaos... then even in this case these laws would be enough for the particles of chaos to unravel themselves and arrange themselves in such a beautiful order that they would form a very perfect world.”
Descartes' teaching was a unified science. Like the philosophers of antiquity, Descartes included natural philosophy in his teaching. However, Descartes based his natural philosophy on mechanics, and it was mechanically one-sided in nature, which was typical for the natural sciences of that time. Descartes can be considered the founder of the principle of short-range action in physics. Ox new theory light, electromagnetic field theory, Molecular physics are a development of Descartes' ideas. Indeed, in the works of many of the greatest physicists of the 19th century. you can find ideas that are a development of the ideas of Descartes, expressed by him back in the 17th century.
The period of formation and development of the natural sciences falls around the 17th century: it begins with the work of Galileo and ends with the research of Newton.
Galileo and Kepler, based on the dynamic and kinematic laws of Aristotle, rethought his mechanics and, as a result of the transition from geocentrism to heliocentrism, came to their own kinematic laws. These laws predetermined Newton's mechanics, which was fundamentally unified for terrestrial and celestial bodies, with all the classical laws of mechanics formed by him, including the law of universal gravitation. Galileo studying free fall bodies, was the first to introduce the concept of inertia and formulate the principle of relativity for mechanical motions, known as Galileo's principle of relativity. The English physicist Isaac Newton (1643-1727) made a decisive contribution to the development of mechanics.
A coherent logical system to the physical picture of the world was given by the laws of mechanics obtained by Newton and set forth in his brilliant work “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” (briefly - “Principles”) in 1687. Newton, more than any other thinker of his generation, introduced into the scientific picture of the world not only new content, but also a fundamentally new style of unambiguous explanation of nature. Newton created the foundations of the theory gravitational field, derived the law of gravity, which determines the gravitational force that acts on a given mass at any point in space, if the mass and position of the body serving as the source of gravitational forces are given, i.e. attracting other bodies to itself.
Newton's dynamic laws not only follow from the corresponding kinematic laws of Galileo and Kepler, but can themselves be used as the basis for all three kinematic laws of Kepler and both kinematic laws of Galileo, as well as all sorts of theoretically expected deviations from them due to their complex structure and mutual gravitational perturbations interacting bodies.
I. Newton believed that the world consists of corpuscles that form bodies and fill the voids between them. Having established the law of universal gravitation, Newton did not explain the causes of gravity and the mechanism for transmitting interaction. Young Newton believed that interaction through the void was carried out by God. Later he comes to the hypothesis of the ether as a carrier of interaction.
The period of the formation of mechanics over time turned into a period of its triumph. Mechanics became the basis of the worldview. Everything that man himself created, everything that exists in nature, was believed to have a single mechanical essence. This was facilitated by further discoveries in natural science, especially in astronomy of a later period.
The formation of a mechanistic picture of the world took several centuries and was completed only by the middle of the 19th century. It should be considered as important stage in the formation of a natural scientific picture of the world.
In this system of the world, substances consist of atoms and molecules in continuous motion. Interactions between bodies occur through direct contact (under the action of elasticity and friction forces) and at a distance (under the action of gravitational forces). The space is filled with all-pervading ether. The interaction of atoms is considered mechanical. There is no understanding of the essence of ether. According to the mechanistic picture of the world, gravitational forces bind all bodies of nature without exception; they are not specific, but general interaction. The laws of gravity determine the relationship of matter to space and of all material bodies to each other. Gravity creates in this sense the real unity of the Universe. The explanation of the nature of the movement of celestial bodies and even the discovery of new planets in the solar system was a triumph of Newton's theory of gravity. h The mechanistic picture of the world was based on the following four principles.
1. The world was built on a single foundation - on Newton’s laws of mechanics. All transformations observed in nature, as well as thermal phenomena at the level of micro-phenomena were reduced to the mechanics of atoms and molecules, their movements, collisions, couplings, and disconnections. It was believed that the discovery was in the middle of the 19th century. The law of conservation and transformation of energy also proved the mechanical unity of the world.
2. In the mechanistic picture of the world, all cause-and-effect relationships are unambiguous; Laplacian determinism reigns here. In the world there is precision and the ability to predetermine the future.
3. In the mechanistic picture of the world there is no development - on the whole, it is the way it has always been. The mechanistic picture of the world actually rejected qualitative changes, reducing everything to purely quantitative changes.
4. The mechanistic picture was based on the idea that the microworld is similar to the macroworld. It was believed that the mechanics of the microworld could explain the patterns of behavior of atoms and molecules.
At its core, this picture of the world was metaphysical, all the diversity of the world was reduced to mechanics, qualitative development, like everything that happens in the world, seemed strictly predetermined and unambiguous.
Metaphysical views on the picture of the world led Newton himself to a constant retreat from the natural scientific worldview and to the explanation of phenomena by supernatural forces, i.e. intervention of God. Newton believed that solar system has existed for centuries as we know it now. But in that case starting position the planets in orbit and its initial speed do not find a physical explanation. According to Newton, the planets received initial speed in the form of a push from God. The stability of the solar system also cannot be explained by gravitational forces alone, and Newton leaves room here for the action of divine forces.
Thus, Newton's concept of forces assigned a certain role to God in nature, in contrast to Cartesian physics, which explained each phenomenon with a special model of a vortex and according to which God, having once created nature, no longer interferes with it. In philosophical models of worldview, this was deeply reflected in all the inconsistency and complexity inherent in the spiritual world of man in the era of liberation from putscholasticism.
The natural scientific picture of the world in the proper sense of the word, as we have already noted, begins to take shape only in the era of the emergence of scientific natural science in the 16th-17th centuries. Analyzing the process of restructuring of consciousness in the era of the 16th-17th centuries, the Western researcher of the externalist trend E. Zilzel believes that the formation of new bourgeois economic relations, permeated with the spirit of rationalism, led to a gradual weakening of the religious, magical perception of the world and the strengthening of rational ideas about the universe. And since the development of production required the development of mechanics, the picture of the world of this era acquired a mechanistic character.
In the history of scientific knowledge, classical mechanics was a new theoretically developed field of natural science, which became the basis of a mechanistic picture of the world. The mechanistic picture of the world was and remains the beginning on which subsequent pictures of the world are based, based on the successes of synergetics or the ideas of global evolutionism.
One of characteristic features The general scientific picture of the world is that its basis is the picture of the world of that field of knowledge that occupies a leading position in a given historical period. In the XVII-XVIII centuries. Mechanics occupied a leading position among the sciences, so the natural science picture of the world was called mechanistic. The laws of mechanics also applied to society and man.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
- Galileo G. Dialogue about two systems of the world // Gallia Izbr. Tr. M., 164. T.1.
- Conversations and mathematical proofs // Ibid. T.2.
- Descartes R. Selected Works. M., 1950.
- Descartes R. Works 13, Vol.2. M.: Mysl, 1989.
- Newton I. Mathematical principles of natural philosophy. Per. A.N. Krylova //Izv. Nikolaev sea acad. 1915. Issue 4.
Bibliographic link
Radjabov O.R. FORMATION OF A MECHANISTIC PICTURE OF THE WORLD // Modern high technology. – 2007. – No. 10. – P. 98-101;URL: http://top-technologies.ru/ru/article/view?id=25571 (access date: 01/04/2020). We bring to your attention magazines published by the publishing house "Academy of Natural Sciences"
The formation of a mechanistic picture of the world is rightly associated with the name of Galileo Galilei, who established the laws of motion of freely falling bodies and formulated the mechanical principle of relativity. But Galileo's main merit is that he was the first to use the experimental method to study nature, together with measurements of the quantities under study and mathematical processing of measurement results. If experiments had been carried out sporadically before, it was he who began to systematically apply their mathematical analysis for the first time.
Galileo's approach to the study of nature was fundamentally different from the previously existing natural philosophical method, in which a priori, not related to experience and observations, purely speculative schemes were invented to explain natural phenomena.
Natural philosophy, as its name suggests, is an attempt to use general philosophical principles to explain nature. Such attempts have been made since ancient times, when philosophers sought to compensate for the lack of specific data with general philosophical reasoning. Sometimes brilliant guesses were made that were many centuries ahead of the results of specific research. It is enough to recall at least the atomistic hypothesis of the structure of matter, which was put forward by the ancient Greek philosopher Leucippus (V BC) and substantiated in more detail by his student Democritus (c. 460 BC - death unknown), and also about the idea of evolution expressed by Empedocles (c. 490 - c. 430 BC) and his followers. However, after concrete sciences gradually emerged and they were separated from undifferentiated philosophical knowledge, natural philosophical explanations became a brake on the development of science.
This can be seen by comparing the views on motion of Aristotle and Galileo. Based on an a priori natural philosophical idea, Aristotle considered circular motion to be “perfect,” and Galileo, based on observations and experiment, introduced the concept of inertial motion. In his opinion, a body that is not subject to the influence of any external forces will not move in a circle, but uniformly along a straight path or remain at rest. This idea, of course, is an abstraction and idealization, since in reality it is impossible to observe such a situation without any forces acting on the body. However, this abstraction is fruitful, because it mentally continues the experiment that can be approximately carried out in reality, when, isolating itself from the action of a number of external forces, it can be established that the body will continue its movement as the influence of extraneous forces on it decreases.
The transition to the experimental study of nature and mathematical processing of experimental results allowed Galileo to discover the laws of motion of freely falling bodies. The fundamental difference between the new method of studying nature and the natural philosophical one was, therefore, that in it hypotheses were systematically tested by experience. The experiment can be seen as a question addressed to nature. To get a definite answer to it, it is necessary to formulate the question in such a way as to obtain a completely unambiguous and definite answer to it. To do this, the experiment should be structured in such a way as to isolate as much as possible from the influence of extraneous factors that interfere with the observation of the phenomenon being studied in its “pure form.” In turn, a hypothesis, which is a question to nature, must allow empirical verification of certain consequences derived from it. For these purposes, starting with Galileo, mathematics began to be widely used to quantify the results of experiments.
Thus, the new experimental natural science, in contrast to the natural philosophical guesses and speculations of the past, began to develop in close cooperation theory and experience, when each hypothesis or theoretical assumption is systematically tested by experience and measurements. It was thanks to this that Galileo was able to refute the previous assumption, made by Aristotle, that the path of a falling body is proportional to its speed. Having undertaken experiments with the fall of heavy bodies (cannonballs), Galileo became convinced that this path was proportional to their acceleration, equal to 9.81 m/s 2 . Among Galileo's astronomical achievements, noteworthy was the discovery of the satellites of Jupiter, as well as the discovery of spots on the Sun and mountains on the Moon, which undermined the previous belief in the perfection of the celestial cosmos.
A new major step in the development of natural science was marked by the discovery of the laws of planetary motion. If Galileo dealt with the study of the movement of terrestrial bodies, then the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) dared to study the movements of celestial bodies, intruding into an area that had previously been considered forbidden for science. In addition, for his research he could not turn to experiment and therefore was forced to use many years of systematic observations of the movement of the planet Mars made by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601). After trying many options, Kepler settled on the hypothesis that the trajectory of Mars, like other planets, is not a circle, but an ellipse. The results of Tycho Brahe's observations were consistent with this hypothesis and thereby confirmed it.
Kepler's discovery of the laws of planetary motion was invaluable for the development of natural science. It testified, firstly, that there is no insurmountable gap between the movements of terrestrial and celestial bodies, since they all obey certain natural laws, and secondly, the very way of discovering the laws of motion of celestial bodies is, in principle, no different from the discovery of the laws of terrestrial bodies . True, due to the impossibility of carrying out experiments with celestial bodies, it was necessary to turn to observations to study the laws of their motion. Nevertheless, here too the research was carried out in close interaction between theory and observation, careful testing of the hypotheses put forward by measurements of the movements of celestial bodies.
The formation of classical mechanics and the mechanistic picture of the world based on it occurred in two directions:
1) generalization of previously obtained results and, first of all, the laws of motion of freely falling bodies discovered by Galileo, as well as the laws of planetary motion formulated by Kepler;
2) creation of methods for quantitative analysis of mechanical motion in general.
It is known that Newton created his own version of differential and integral calculus directly to solve the basic problems of mechanics: the definition instantaneous speed as a derivative of the path with respect to the time of motion and acceleration as a derivative of the speed with respect to time or the second derivative of the path with respect to time. Thanks to this, he was able to accurately formulate the basic laws of dynamics and the law of universal gravitation. Now a quantitative approach to the description of movement seems to be something self-evident, but in the 18th century. this was the greatest achievement of scientific thought. For comparison, it is enough to note that Chinese science, despite its undoubted achievements in empirical fields (the invention of gunpowder, paper, the compass and other discoveries), was never able to rise to the establishment of quantitative laws of motion. The decisive role in the development of mechanics was played, as already noted, by the experimental method, which provided the opportunity to test all guesses, assumptions and hypotheses with the help of carefully thought out experiments.
Newton, like his predecessors, gave great importance observations and experiment, seeing them as the most important criterion for separating false hypotheses from true ones. Therefore, he sharply opposed the assumption of so-called hidden qualities, with the help of which Aristotle’s followers tried to explain many phenomena and processes of nature.
To say that each kind of thing is endowed with a special hidden quality with the help of which it acts and produces effects, Newton pointed out, means to say nothing.
In this regard, he puts forward a completely new principle for the study of nature, according to which to deduce two or three general principles of motion from phenomena and then set out how the properties and actions of all corporeal things follow from these obvious principles would be a very important step in philosophy, although the reasons for these principles have not yet been discovered.
These principles of motion represent the fundamental laws of mechanics, which Newton precisely formulated in his main work, “The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,” published in 1687.
The first law, often called the law of inertia, states:
Every body continues to be maintained in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line until and unless it is forced by applied forces to change this state.
This law, as noted above, was discovered by Galileo, who abandoned the previous naive ideas that motion exists only when forces act on the body. Through thought experiments, he was able to show that as the influence of external forces decreases, the body will continue its movement, so that in the absence of all external forces it must remain either at rest or in a uniform and straight motion. Of course, in real movements one can never completely free oneself from the influence of friction forces, air resistance and other external forces, and therefore the law of inertia is an idealization in which one abstracts from the truly complex picture of movement and imagines an ideal picture that can be obtained by going to the limit, those. through a continuous decrease in the effect of external forces on the body and a transition to a state where this effect becomes zero.
The second fundamental law occupies a central place in mechanics:
The change in momentum is proportional to the applied acting force and occurs in the direction of the straight line along which this force acts.
Newton's third law:
An action always has an equal and oppositely directed reaction, otherwise the interactions of two bodies on each other are equal and directed in opposite directions.
The question arises: how were these fundamental laws or principles of mechanics discovered? It is often said that they are obtained by generalizing previously established particular or even special laws, such as, for example, the laws of Galileo and Kepler. If we reason according to the laws of logic, such a view cannot be considered correct, because there are no inductive rules for obtaining general statements from particular ones. Newton believed that the principles of mechanics are established using two opposing, but at the same time interrelated methods - analysis and synthesis.
Both in mathematics and in natural philosophy, he wrote, the study of difficult subjects by the method of analysis must always precede the method of combination. Such analysis consists of making experiments and observations, drawing general conclusions from them by induction, and admitting no other objections to the conclusions than those derived from experience or other reliable truths. For hypotheses are not to be considered in experimental philosophy. And although argumentation from experience is not a proof of general conclusions, yet it is the best way of argumentation allowed by the nature of things, and can be considered all the more powerful than general induction... By such analysis we can move from compounds to ingredients, from movements - to the forces that produce them, and in general from actions to their causes, from particular causes to more general ones, until the argument ends with the most general cause.
This is the method of analysis; synthesis presupposes the causes to be discovered and established as principles; it consists in explaining, by means of principles, the phenomena arising from them, and proving the explanations.
In order to clearly assess the revolutionary revolution carried out by Newton in mechanics and exact natural science in general, it is necessary first of all to contrast his method of principles with the purely speculative constructions of the previous natural philosophy and the hypotheses about “hidden” qualities that were widespread in his time. We have already spoken about the natural philosophical approach to the study of nature, noting that in the overwhelming majority such views were unsupported speculations and speculations. And although the title of Newton’s book also contains the term “natural philosophy,” in the 17th and 18th centuries. it denoted the study of nature, i.e. natural science. Newton's assertion that hypotheses should not be considered in experimental philosophy was directed against hypotheses about “hidden” qualities, while genuine hypotheses, capable of experimental verification, constitute the basis and starting point of all research in natural science. As you might guess, the principles themselves are also hypotheses of a deep and very general nature.
When developing his method of principles, Newton was guided by the axiomatic method, brilliantly applied by Euclid in the construction of elementary geometry. However, instead of axioms, he relied on principles, and distinguished mathematical proofs from experimental ones, since the latter are not strictly reliable, but only probabilistic. It is also important to note that knowledge of the principles or laws that govern phenomena does not imply the discovery of their causes. This can be seen from Newton's assessment of the law of universal gravitation. He always emphasized that this law establishes only the quantitative dependence of the force of gravity on the gravitating masses and the square of the distance between them.
As for the cause of gravity, he considered its discovery a matter of further research.
It is enough that gravity actually exists and acts according to the laws we have set forth, and is quite sufficient to explain all the movements of the celestial bodies and the sea, wrote Newton.
The discovery of the principles of mechanics really means a truly revolutionary revolution, which is associated with the transition from natural philosophical guesses and hypotheses about “hidden” qualities, etc., speculative fabrications to precise experimental natural science, in which all assumptions, hypotheses and theoretical constructions were verified by observations and experience. Since mechanics abstracts from qualitative changes in bodies, “for its analysis it was possible to widely use mathematical abstractions and the analysis of infinitesimals created by Newton himself and at the same time by Leibniz (1646-1716). Thanks to this, the study of mechanical processes was reduced to their exact mathematical description.
For such a description, it was necessary and sufficient to specify the coordinates of the body and its speed (or momentum mv), as well as the equation of its motion. All subsequent states of a moving body were accurately and unambiguously determined by its initial state. Thus, by defining this state, it was possible to determine any other state of it, both in the future and in the past. It turns out that time has no effect on the change of moving bodies, so that in the equations of motion the sign of time could be reversed. Obviously, such a representation was an idealization of real processes, since it abstracts from actual changes that occur over time.
Consequently, classical mechanics and the mechanistic picture of the world as a whole are characterized by the symmetry of processes in time, which is expressed in the reversibility of time. This easily gives the impression that no real changes occur during the mechanical movement of bodies. By specifying the equation of motion of a body, its coordinates and speed at some point in time, which is often called its initial state, we can accurately and unambiguously determine its state at any other point in time in the future or past. Let's formulate characteristics mechanistic picture of the world.
1. All states of mechanical motion of bodies in relation to time turn out to be basically the same, since time is considered reversible.
2. Everything mechanical processes are subject to the principle of strict or hard determinism, the essence of which is the recognition of the possibility of an accurate and unambiguous determination of the state of a mechanical system by its previous state.
According to this principle, chance is completely excluded from nature. Everything in the world is strictly determined (or determined) by previous states, events and phenomena. When this principle is extended to the actions and behavior of people, one inevitably comes to fatalism. In a mechanistic picture, the world around us itself turns into a grandiose machine, all subsequent states of which are precisely and unambiguously determined by its previous states. This point of view on nature was most clearly and figuratively expressed by the outstanding French scientist of the 16th century. Pierre Simon Laplace (1749--2827):
A mind which, for any given moment, knew all the forces that animate nature, if in addition it were vast enough to subject all data to analysis, would embrace in one formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the Universe on a par with the movements of the lightest atoms; there would be nothing left that would be unreliable for him, and the future, as well as the past, would appear before his gaze.
3. Space and time are in no way connected with the movements of bodies; they are absolute.
In this regard, Newton introduces the concepts of absolute, or mathematical, space and time. This picture is reminiscent of the ideas about the world of the ancient atomists, who believed that atoms move in empty space. Similarly, in Newtonian mechanics, space turns out to be a simple container of bodies moving in it, which do not have any influence on it. As we will show later, such ideas were sharply criticized in the theory of relativity.
4. The tendency to reduce patterns more tall shapes the movement of matter to the laws of its simplest form - mechanical movement.
This desire met criticism from biologists, doctors and some chemists already in the 18th century. Outstanding materialist philosophers Denis Diderot (1713-1784) and Paul Holbach (1723-1789) also opposed it, not to mention the vitalists, who attributed to living organisms a special “vital force”, the presence of which allegedly distinguishes them from inanimate bodies . From the philosophy course you already know that mechanism, which tried to approach all processes without exception from the point of view of the principles and scope of mechanics, was one of the prerequisites for the emergence of the metaphysical method of thinking.
5. The connection between mechanism and the principle of long-range action, according to which actions and signals can be transmitted in empty space at any speed.
In particular, it was assumed that gravitational forces, or forces of attraction, act without any intermediate medium, but their strength decreases with the square of the distance between the bodies. Newton himself, as we have seen, left the question of the nature of these forces to be decided by future generations.
All of the above and some other features predetermined the limitations of the mechanistic picture of the world, which were overcome in the course of the subsequent development of natural science.