1 - Universal laws of nature

Summary

In the presentation of the motions of the heavens, the ancients began with the principle that a natural retrograde motion must of necessity be a uniform circular motion. Supported in this particular by the authority of Aristotle, an axiomatic character was given to this proposition, whose content, in fact, is very easily grasped by one with a naive point of view; men deemed it necessary and ceased to consider another possibility. Without reflecting, Copernicus and Tycho Brahe still embraced this conception, and naturally the astronomers of their time did likewise.

Johannes Kepler, by Max Caspar

Mechanics in the context of history

It is very tempting to follow the mathematicians and present classical mechanics in an axiomatic or postulational way, especially in a book about theory and methods. Newton wrote in that way for reasons that are described in Westfall's biography (1980). Following the abstract Euclidean mode of presentation would divorce our subject superficially from the history of western European thought and therefore from its real foundations, which are abstractions based upon reproducible empiricism. A postulational approach, which is really a Platonic approach, would mask the way that universal laws of regularities of nature were discovered in the late middle ages in an atmosphere where authoritarian religious academics purported pseudo-scientifically to justify the burning of witches and other nonconformers to official dogma, and also tried to define science by the appeal to authority.