Relativity Principles and Theories From Galileo To Einstein Olivier Darrigol Full Chapter PDF

Relativity Principles and Theories from
Galileo to Einstein Olivier Darrigol

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/relativity-principles-and-theories-from-galileo-to-einst
ein-olivier-darrigol/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Special relativity, electrodynamics, and general

relativity : from Newton to Einstein Second Edition
Kogut
https://ebookmass.com/product/special-relativity-electrodynamics-
and-general-relativity-from-newton-to-einstein-second-edition-
kogut/
Covariant Physics - From Classical Mechanics to General

Relativity and Beyond 1st Edition Moataz H. Emam
https://ebookmass.com/product/covariant-physics-from-classical-
mechanics-to-general-relativity-and-beyond-1st-edition-moataz-h-
emam/
Evil Lords: Theories and Representations of Tyranny

from Antiquity to the Renaissance Nikos Panou
https://ebookmass.com/product/evil-lords-theories-and-
representations-of-tyranny-from-antiquity-to-the-renaissance-
nikos-panou/
Relativity Made Relatively Easy. Volume 2: General

Relativity and Cosmology Andrew M. Steane
https://ebookmass.com/product/relativity-made-relatively-easy-
volume-2-general-relativity-and-cosmology-andrew-m-steane/
Motor Learning and Performance: From Principles to
Application 5th Edition – Ebook PDF Version
https://ebookmass.com/product/motor-learning-and-performance-
from-principles-to-application-5th-edition-ebook-pdf-version/
Relativity without spacetime Cosgrove
https://ebookmass.com/product/relativity-without-spacetime-
cosgrove/
Shape Dynamics: Relativity and Relationalism Flavio

Mercati
https://ebookmass.com/product/shape-dynamics-relativity-and-
relationalism-flavio-mercati/
Dialogue on the Two Greatest World Systems Galileo
https://ebookmass.com/product/dialogue-on-the-two-greatest-world-
systems-galileo/
Digital Solutions: Reframing Leadership Olivier Serrat
https://ebookmass.com/product/digital-solutions-reframing-
leadership-olivier-serrat/
RELATIVITY PRINCIPLES AND THEORIES
FROM GALILEO TO EINSTEIN
Relativity Principles
and Theories from Galileo
to Einstein
OLIVIER DARRIGOL
Research Director, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique: SPHere
3
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Olivier Darrigol 2022
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938605
ISBN 978-0-19-284953-3(Hbk)
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849533.001.0001
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
CONTENTS
Preface viii
Conventions and notations xiii
1 Rethinking motion in the seventeenth century 1

1.1 Galileo’s science of motion 2
1.2 Beeckman and Descartes on free fall 8
1.3 Descartes’s world 10
1.4 Newton’s laws of motion 13
1.5 Huygens’s mechanics 19
Conclusions 23
2 Deriving Newton’s second law from relativity principles 28

2.1 Rational mechanics in the eighteenth century 29
2.2 Nineteenth-century French textbooks 36
2.3 Principles and deductions 42
Conclusions 47
3 The space–time–inertia tangle 52

3.1 From Huygens to Kant 53
3.2 Criticism in the last third of the nineteenth century 61
3.3 The measurement of time 75
Conclusions 79
4 The optics of moving bodies 84

4.1 The speed of light 85
4.2 The corpuscular approach 88
4.3 Stellar aberrations in the wave theory 92
4.4 The Fresnel drag 102
4.5 Toward an optical relativity 108
Conclusions 114
5 The electrodynamics of moving bodies 118

5.1 Early electrodynamics 119
5.2 German action at a distance 121
5.3 British field theories 124
5.4 Maxwell in Germany 133
5.5 Effects of absolute motion 137
vi CONTENTS
5.6 The separation of ether and matter 141

Conclusions 152
6 Poincaré’s relativity theory 157

6.1 Critical teaching 159
6.2 For the Lorentz jubilee 165
6.3 Inside the electron 170
6.4 The postulate of relativity 175
Conclusions 184
7 The relativity theory of Einstein, Minkowski, and Laue 188

7.1 The young Einstein’s ventures in electrodynamics 191
7.2 Alternatives to Lorentz’s theory 195
7.3 Einstein’s relativity theory 202
7.4 Early reception 1905–1908 212
7.5 Constructing a relativistic electron 222
7.6 Outside Germany 229
Conclusions 231
8 From Riemann to Ricci 236

8.1 Gauss’s curved surfaces 239
8.2 Riemann’s curvature 244
8.3 Non-Euclidean geometries 250
8.4 The absolute differential calculus 256
Conclusions 267
9 Mostly Einstein: To general relativity 269

9.1 Heuristic arguments (1906–1911) 272
9.2 The static theory of 1912 280
9.3 The Zürich notebook 289
9.4 The Entwurf theory of 1913 298
9.5 The scalar theory 302
9.6 Bridled covariance 305
9.7 Justified transformations and adapted coordinates 309
9.8 November 1915 314
Conclusions 326
10 Mesh and measure in early general relativity 341

10.1 A Gaussian preliminary 344
10.2 Einstein’s Grundlage of 1916 348
10.3 The gravitational redshift 360
10.4 The gravitational deflection of light 368
CONTENTS vii
10.5 The advance of Mercury’s perihelion 375

Conclusions 386
11 Epilogue 389
11.1 Actors and stages 389
11.2 Mechanical relativity 392
11.3 Optical relativity 398
11.4 Electrodynamic relativity 400
11.5 Special relativity 404
11.6 General relativity 407
Abbreviations 416
References 417
Index 465
PREFACE
[The theory of relativity] did not at all originate in a revolutionary act but as
a natural development of a line that can be traced through centuries.¹ (Albert
Einstein, 1921)
The relativity theories of the early twentieth century deeply altered our most basic notions
of space, time, and motion. They made time depend on the observer, they entwined space
and time, and they reduced gravitation to inertial motion in a curved space–time. Histori-
ans have tried to explain the radicalness of these changes in various ways: through Einstein’s
peculiar genius, through contemporary developments in philosophy or technology, and
through a major crisis in physics around 1900. These three explanations correspond to
three alleged preconditions of radical change: singular minds, external causation, and
internal crisis. The internal crisis approach is perhaps the most convincing, because philo-
sophical and technological considerations may have been internalized before they served
the founders of relativity, and because the singularity of these founders may boil down to
their ability to detect and solve crises. But this approach can only be a first approximation,
and a fuller history should combine internal, external, and biographical elements.
Whether or not they come close to this ideal, the received histories of relativity are
short-term, fragmented histories. Special and general relativity are usually treated sepa-
rately, and the maximal time span is about a century long (in the internal crisis approach),
with a focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. There are exceptions:
Jürgen Renn has compared the emergence of relativity theory with the emergence of early
modern mechanics; Jean Eisenstaedt has developed analogies between eighteenth-century
Newtonian optics and general relativity; several philosophers, including Roberto Torretti
and Robert DiSalle, have explored the various concepts of space and time in the history
of physics from Aristotle to relativity; and one physicist, Julian Barbour, has probed the
long-term history of dynamics from a Machian viewpoint. But their main intention was
not to demonstrate genuine, long-term historical connections: it was to instruct on the va-
riety of possible concepts, to reflect on their similarities and differences, or (in Renn’s case)
to illustrate a generic theory of conceptual development.²
In contrast, this book presents a long-term, multi-approach history of relativity from
Galileo to Einstein, in the various contexts of mechanics, mathematics, philosophy, astron-
omy, optics, and electrodynamics. One might fear that any attempt to connect events three
¹ Einstein [1921], p. 431.

² Torretti 1978; Renn 1993; Barbour 2001; Eisenstaedt 2005b; DiSalle 2006. Also worth mentioning are Marie-
Antoinette Tonnelat’s Histoire du principe de relativité (Tonnelat 1971) for an analysis of the successive meanings
of relativity from antiquity to general relativity; and Raffaella Toncelli’s dissertation on the role of principles in the
construction of relativity theory (Toncelli 2010), which also has a very large scope.
PREFACE ix
centuries apart would be superficial and artificial, and this was my own opinion until I re-
alized, after a few partial pre-histories, that genuine historical connections existed between
the various uses of relativity principles across three centuries. I observed two kinds of con-
nectedness. First, at least until the early twentieth century physicists had a much longer
memory than they have nowadays. They read and exploited literature written centuries
earlier, whereas today scientists tend to disregard anything older than a few years. Second,
there were indirect historical connections through chains of successive borrowings. In both
cases it is essential, in a properly historical study, to take into account the change of context
in the borrowing process, even when the borrower is not aware of this change. Otherwise
we would misunderstand the successive systems of thought, and we would misrepresent
the transfer of knowledge from one system to another.³
When developed with sufficient care, this long-term view has several advantages. It
shows that questions about the nature of space, time, and inertia traversed the history of
physics from the early modern period to the relativity theories, although the answers given
to these questions varied considerably. It explains how the relativity principle emerged
as a true, constructive principle as early as the seventeenth century, how it came to be
named so in the mid-nineteenth century to mark its constructive power in mechanics,
and how this name and concept reached the young Einstein. It demonstrates deep analo-
gies between some authors’ dismissal of Newton’s absolute space and Einstein’s later
dismissal of the electromagnetic ether. It establishes an indirect historical link between
a corollary of Newton’s Principia and Einstein’s equivalence principle, through a French
principle of accelerative relativity. It situates both principles in a space–time–inertia tangle
that originated in Galileo’s and Newton’s theories of motion and evolved into Einstein’s
final reduction of gravitation to inertia, through intermediate steps in the eighteenth and
nineteenth century. Also, there are advantages in treating the histories of special and gen-
eral relativity in the same volume: this highlights the continuity of Einstein’s endeavors,
and shows the importance of Minkowski’s and Laue’s versions of the special theory in
Einstein’s quest for a relativistic field theory of gravitation.
Any long-term history faces difficulties in naming basic concepts and principles across
time. Today, we usually define the relativity principle through the complete equivalence of
all inertial reference frames. It is impossible or at least dangerous to apply this definition
uniformly from Galileo to Einstein. The name “reference frame” first appeared in 1884,
under James Thomson’s pen. The concept earlier existed under different names, guises,
and extensions: a metonymical boat for Galileo, a “space” for Newton, and a “system
of axes” for Laplace. Statements of relativity had a variable status: an empirical fact for
Galileo, a theorem for Newton, and a genuine principle for Huygens, Laplace, and later
French authors. There were different theorems and principles of relativity (hence the plural
in my title) according to the implied class of equivalent frames: inertial frames and acceler-
ated frames for Newton, Laplace, and Bélanger; just inertial frames for Huygens, Poincaré,
and the early Einstein; and any accelerated frame and even a framing “mollusk” for the
later Einstein. Until the late nineteenth century, relativity principles and theorems were
³ By context I here mean intellectual and experimental context, although the changes in this narrower context
usually imply the broader socio-cultural context.
x PREFACE
most frequently formulated in the active form, as the absence of effects of a commonly im-
pressed motion on the relative motions of a system of bodies under given forces, and more
rarely in the passive form, as the lack of effects of a change of reference frame. All these
ambiguities should be kept in mind when, for the convenience of the reader, I will some-
times use “reference frame” instead of the true historical term. That said, there is enough
kinship between the various kinds of relativity to justify a global historical account of their
meaning and purpose.
Chapter 1 describes the new theories of motion of the seventeenth century and the emer-
gence of relativity facts, theorems, and principles in conjunction with new concepts of
mechanical inertia. Chapter 2 recounts how, following Huygens’s pioneering derivation
of the laws of free fall, a number of French authors used a relativity principle to derive
Newton’s second law of motion, how the name “principle of relative motions” appeared in
this context, how Poincaré modified this name, and how he passed it to Einstein. Chapter 3
discusses difficulties in the correlative definitions of space, time, and inertia from Newton
to late-nineteenth-century critics of the foundations of mechanics, the repeated rejections
of Newton’s absolute space, and Streintz’s final suggestion of an intrinsic Galilean space–
time. At this point, the reader will have viewed the emergence of a mechanical relativity
principle with constructive and representational functions. Chapter 4 is about the relativ-
ity that emerged in corpuscular optics and survived wave optics despite the existence of the
ether as a privileged frame. As is explained in Chapter 5, a similar tension between ether
and relativity existed in the electrodynamics of moving bodies, and Lorentz alleviated it
without suppressing it in his electron theory of the 1890s. Chapter 6 shows how Poincaré
raised optical and electrodynamic relativity to a principle on par with the mechanical rel-
ativity principle, and how he transformed Lorentz’s theory into a first version of special
relativity. Chapter 7 describes the elaboration of more radical and more potent forms of
special relativity in the hands of Einstein, Minkowski, and Laue. Chapter 8 shows how
Riemann and his followers invented the mathematics Einstein employed in general relativ-
ity, also how the emergence of non-Euclidean geometry inspired Poincaré and Minkowski.
Chapter 9 is a medium-sized account of the long and twisted genesis of general relativity.
Chapter 10 covers the difficulties Einstein’s early readers encountered in trying to make
sense of this theory, and the great clarification brought by Weyl, Eddington, and others.
The epilogue brings out the interconnections of the developments described in the previous
chapters. Two of these chapters, the eighth and the ninth, are formally and mathematically
more demanding than the others. Readers who do not wish to enter technicalities may
content themselves with the summaries given in their concluding sections.
There is plenty of secondary literature for most of the topics addressed in this book.
The most important studies are indicated at the beginning of each chapter, and the rest
in footnotes. For the moment, it will be sufficient to signal the sources I found most
useful for my project. On the ether-theoretical background to special relativity, there is
Edmund Whittaker’s old and rich A History of Aether and Electricity, Tetu Hirosige on
Lorentz and electrodynamic origins, and Russell McCormmach on the electromagnetic
worldview. Arthur Miller’s Albert Einstein’s Special Relativity remains a standard reference
of great value. More recent contributions to the history and contexts of special relativ-
ity include Michel Janssen’s dissertation on the relation between Lorentz’s theory and
PREFACE xi
special relativity in the light of the Trouton–Noble experiments, Scott Walter’s disserta-
tion on Minkowski and the mathematical reception of relativity, Peter Galison’s Einstein’s
Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps, Richard Staley’s Einstein’s Generation, Jean-Pierre Provost and
Christian Bracco’s studies of Poincaré’s relativity theory, Marco Giovanelli’s thorough
study of principles-based vs. constructive approaches to relativistic dynamics, and Galina
Weinstein’s Einstein’s Pathway. On the history of general relativity, much value can be
found in Abraham Pais’s Subtle Is the Lord, in John Stachel’s contemporary discussions
of the rigid-body problem, in John Norton’s groundbreaking study of Einstein’s Zürich
notebook, in Jean Eisenstaedt’s history of the Schwarzschild singularity, in Weinstein’s
General Relativity Conflict and Rivalries, and in the multi-volume Genesis directed by
Jürgen Renn. This last, collective enterprise groups highly competent and thorough stud-
ies by John Norton, John Stachel, Jürgen Renn, Tilman Sauer, Michel Janssen, and a few
other scholars. Useful studies of pre-relativistic considerations on the relativity of mo-
tion include Christiane Vilain’s La mécanique de Christiaan Huygens, Giulio Maltese’s
study of Euler’s relativity considerations, Marius Stan’s articles on Huygens, Kant, and
relativity, Jean Eisenstaedt’s Avant Einstein, and Alberto Martínez’s Kinematics. Lastly,
a few historico-philosophical studies helped me clarify conceptual issues encountered in
the primary sources: Lawrence Sklar’s two Spacetime books, Roberto Torretti’s Philoso-
phy of Geometry, Michael Friedman’s Foundations of Spacetime Theories and his Kant’s
Construction of Nature, John Earman’s World Enough, Michel Paty’s Einstein Philosophe,
Julian Barbour’s The Discovery of Dynamics, Harvey Brown’s Physical Relativity, Robert
DiSalle’s Understanding Spacetime, Thomas Ryckman’s The Reign of Relativity and his
recent Einstein.⁴
This book is the end result of an old interest of mine in the origins of relativity theory.
I fell in love with this theory in my teen years, while reading Landau and Lifshitz on a Cap
Ferret beach on the western shores of France. In the 1980s, I contributed to the French
Einstein project under the direction of Françoise Balibar, benefiting from John Stachel’s
expertise for the volumes on relativity. In the 1990s, I studied the electrodynamic origins of
the special theory as the natural conclusion of a history of electrodynamics. More recently
I worked on the optics of moving bodies, on Riemann’s geometry and consequences, on the
early reception of general relativity, and on the genesis of this theory. My return to general
relativity and my idea to write a history of relativity from Galileo to Einstein derived from
my philosophical interest in the coordination between theory and experience, and from
my decision, in the light of Ryckman’s Reign of Relativity, to focus on the most basic and
oldest problem of coordination, the spatial and temporal ordering of events. Ryckman
having explored this problem through the philosophical reception of general relativity,
I wanted to retrace its evolution from early modern mechanics to general relativity.
⁴ Whittaker 1951; Hirosige 1966, 1969, 1976; McCormmach 1970; Sklar 1974, 1985; Torretti 1978; Stachel 1980,
1989a, 1989b; Miller 1981a; Eisenstaedt 1982, 2005; Pais 1982; Friedman 1983, 2013; Earman 1989; Paty 1993;
Janssen 1995; Vilain 1996; Walter 1996a; Maltese 2000; Barbour 2002; Galison 2003; Brown 2005; Ryckman 2005,
2017; Provost and Bracco 2006, 2009; DiSalle 2006; Staley 2008; Martínez 2009; Stan 2009, 2016; Weinstein 2015a,
2015b; Giovanelli 2020; Renn et al. GGR. Also worth mentioning is Christopher Ray’s The evolution of relativ-
ity (Ray 1987) for its analysis of the foundations of general relativity from Einstein to Hawking, with Mach’s
philosophy of motion as a backdrop.
xii PREFACE
During all these years, I benefited from the lively and pleasant environment of the
SPHere research team at Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris,
with unabated support from its successive directors Michel Paty, Karine Chemla, Pascal
Crozet, David Rabouin, and Sabine Rommevaux. I had numerous, instructive conver-
sations with my closest colleagues in this team: Nadine de Courtenay, Jan Lacki, Sara
Franceschelli, and Martha-Cecilia Bustamante. My research was greatly eased and en-
riched by my affiliation to UC-Berkeley’s renowned Office for History of Science and
Technology under the wings of John Heilbron, Cathryn Carson, and Massimo Massotti.
While researching the history and prehistory of relativity theory, I profited from enlight-
ening exchanges with John Heilbron, Jed Buchwald, John Norton, Peter Galison, Harvey
Brown, Tom Ryckman, and Thibault Damour. Back on the very beach on which I first
encountered relativity theory, I fondly remember all these colleagues and friends and I
warmly thank them for easing, guiding, and illuminating my intellectual voyage through
the mysteries of space and time coordination.
CONVENTIONS AND NOTATIONS
• For the sake of the physicist reader, I use modernized and standardized notation
whenever the original notation did not essentially condition the historical devel-
opments. For example, I use the modern vector notation in older mechanics and
electrodynamics although its propagation began only in the late nineteenth century.
For general relativity, I use the modern tensor notation, which departs from Einstein’s
original notation in ways indicated at the beginning of Chapter 9. For the history
of these notations, I invite the reader to read the classical studies by Michael Crowe
and Karin Reich. While the historical significance of a change of notation may some-
times be high, its conceptual and practical importance has often been exaggerated.
For instance, in older mechanics, the geometrical representation of vector quan-
tities permitted an intrinsic conception of vectors without the vector notation; in
older electrodynamics, the practice of writing only one of the three components of a
Cartesian-coordinate equation (the two other components being implicitly given by
circular permutation) compensated for the lack of an intrinsic notation.⁵
• Citations are in the author–date format and refer to the appended bibliography
(I use “cf.” in the French way, to refer to a source in the secondary literature). Square
brackets around a date indicate a manuscript source. Abbreviations are listed on
p. 416 before the bibliography.
• Translations from Latin, German, and French are mine unless the cited source
already is a translation.
⁵ Crowe 1967; Reich 1994. For the historical representation of mechanical quantities, cf. Martínez 2009, chap. 4.
On the use of four-vectors in Minkowski space, cf. Walter 2007b.
1
RETHINKING MOTION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
I know that you, Simplicio, have gone from Padua by boat many times, and, if
you will admit the truth of the matter, you have never felt within yourself your
participation in that motion except when the boat has been stopped by running
aground or by striking some obstacle, when you and the other passengers, taken
by surprise, have stumbled perilously.¹ (Galileo Galilei, 1632)
The Scientific Revolution brought a drastic rethinking of motion, now subjected to laws
never dreamt of by Aristotelian philosophers. A few brave supporters of the Copernican
cosmos, Kepler and Galileo foremost, measured the consequences of changing the ref-
erence of planetary motion from the earth to the sun. By erasing the ancient difference
between the sublunary and celestial worlds, the new system required common concepts
of motion in the two worlds. In addition, Galileo and Descartes promoted a fully math-
ematical, geometric understanding of the physical world, based on the simplest and least
speculative concept of change, that is, locomotion. Beeckman, Galileo, and Newton ap-
pealed to the motion of atoms; Descartes and Huygens to the relative motions of the
particles of a plenum. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the relevant theories
of motion, with special attention to the relativity issue.²
The motion of a body is always defined in reference to something regarded as immo-
bile. As we will see in this chapter, the concept of this “something” varied considerably
in seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy. For Descartes (as for Aristotle), it was the
medium in which the body is immersed. For Galileo, it was a distinguished material system,
for instance the sun and fixed stars, the earth, or a boat; for Newton, it was space re-
garded as an immaterial, rigid, immobile, penetrable substratum of all things. To each kind
of reference corresponded a different concept of inertia. Galileo, Beeckman, Descartes,
Huygens, and Newton all assumed the persistence of the motion of a body left to itself
for a variety of reasons: response to the need to harmonize celestial and terrestrial mo-
tions, continuity with the medieval concept of impetus, logical necessity in a neo-atomist
world picture, God’s predilection for permanence. For Galileo, inertia could be circular,
and it covered both the motions of planets around the sun and the motion of a ball on
a horizontal table on earth; for Descartes, inertial motion was rectilinear and referred to
¹ Galilei 1632, p. 255.

² On the Scientific Revolution, cf. Cohen 2015, and further references therein.
Relativity Principles and Theories from Galileo to Einstein. Olivier Darrigol, Oxford University Press.
© Olivier Darrigol (2022). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849533.003.0001
2 RETHINKING MOTION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
the surrounding medium; for Newton, it was rectilinear in absolute space. These different
concepts of inertia implied different laws of motion and different takes on the relativity of
motion.
For Galileo, the motion of a system of bodies obeyed the same laws whether it was
referred to the earth or to a boat uniformly moving on the sea. For Huygens, the simi-
larity extended to any reference frame in which the law of uniform, rectilinear inertia is
valid. For Newton, this similarity applied to any reference frame moving uniformly and
rectilinearly in absolute space; it also applied to a system of bodies subjected to a com-
mon acceleration, as is the case when the bodies are all subjected to the attraction of a
remote heavy mass. For Descartes, the laws of motion could depend only on the relative
position of the particles of the world. In modern parlance, Descartes anticipated Mach’s
elimination of any immaterial reference of motion, while Galileo, Huygens, and Newton
detected a basic invariance of the laws of motion within a privileged class of reference
frames. Newton included uniformly and rectilinearly accelerated frames in this class, thus
partially anticipating Einstein’s equivalence principle.
Another important distinction concerns the architectonic role of the invariance as-
serted in the relativity statements of Galileo, Newton, and Huygens. As we will see,
Galileo was mostly concerned with a law of relativity, directly inferred from observa-
tions (on a boat) or indirectly from the empirical laws of free fall. In contrast, Newton’s
relativity statements were theorems deduced from his three laws of motion (which he be-
lieved he had deduced from experience). Huygens inaugurated a relativity principle that
comes before the mechanical laws and contributes to their derivation. This was a crucial
step in regard to the later role of the principle in justifying or constructing theories of
motion.
It would be artificial to limit this chapter to the consideration of a few extracts of the
major text in which relativity statements appeared in the seventeenth century. As was just
indicated, such considerations cannot be separated from the theories of motion and the
philosophies of nature to which they belong. Also, these theories and philosophies form
part of the background in which later recourse to relativity principles occurred. With this
in mind, we will successively consider the decisive contributions of Galileo, Beeckman,
Descartes, Newton, and Huygens.
1.1 Galileo’s science of motion

Inertia and relativity
In 1632, after many years of self-restraint, Galileo Galilei published his lengthy, witty, and
risky Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, a powerful defense of the Coperni-
can system through a dialogue between three fictional characters: the brilliant Copernican
Salviati, the obtuse scholiast Simplicio, and the inquisitive Sagredo. An important part of
their second day is devoted to a then frequent objection to the rotation of the earth: that
it would imply never observed alterations of the way bodies move on earth. In particular,
a stone, when falling from a vertical tower, would not fall at the foot of the tower because
during the fall the ground and the tower would be carried eastward by the rotating earth.
To fortify this point by experiment, the objector might add that on a moving ship, a stone
GALILEO’S SCIENCE OF MOTION 3
released from the top of a mast should fall behind the mast as a result of the progression
of the ship.³
Salviati denies both the point and the experiment. The Aristotelians, he explains, have
erred in ignoring the horizontal velocity of the stone at the beginning of its fall from the
top of a tower. This velocity, being part of the natural circular motion of all terrestrial
bodies, has to remain constant during the fall so that stone and tower constantly share the
same horizontal motion and the stone therefore falls along the mast. The persistency of
horizontal motion was indeed alien to Aristotle’s physics. In this doctrine, natural motion
in the sublunary world is directed to or from the center of the universe, which coincides with
the center of the earth. Horizontal motion is “violent” or forced motion of external origin,
and it cannot persist without a sustaining force. In the first day of the dialogue, Salviati has
purposely redefined natural motion as motion that does not disturb the global arrangement
of the world. Accordingly, circular motion is equally natural for the rotating earth and for
the circulation of the earth and the planets around the sun, whereas for Aristotle circular
motion is natural only for celestial bodies moving around the earth.⁴
Besides this cosmological consideration, Salviati asserts that for the moving ship too,
the falling stone accompanies the ship in its horizontal motion. If Aristotle’s followers had
truly performed the experiment, Salviati tells Simplicio, they would have seen that the ship’s
motion has no effect on the fall observed by the sailors. Salviati bases his conviction on
two empirical facts: the constant velocity of a ball rolling on a perfectly smooth horizontal
table (the resistance of the air being negligible), and the independence between vertical
and horizontal motion during the rolling of the ball on an inclined plane. Most vividly, he
argues that common experience confirms the absence of effects of a ship’s uniform motion
on the passengers’ internal observations:⁵
Shut yourself up with some friend in the main cabin below decks on some large ship,
and have with you there some flies, butterflies, and other small flying animals. Have a
large bowl of water with some fish in it; hang up a bottle that empties drop by drop
into a wide vessel beneath it. With the ship standing still, observe carefully how the
little animals fly with equal speed to all sides of the cabin. The fish swim indifferently
in all directions; the drops fall into the vessel beneath; and, in throwing something
to your friend, you need throw it no more strongly in one direction than another,
the distances being equal; jumping with your feet together, you pass equal spaces in
every direction. When you have observed all these things carefully (though there is
no doubt that when the ship is standing still everything must happen in this way),
have the ship proceed with any speed you like, so long as the motion is uniform and
not fluctuating this way and that. You will discover not the least change in all the
effects named, nor could you tell from any of them whether the ship was moving or
³ Galilei 1632, p. 126; also Galilei to Ingoli 1624, in Finocchiaro 1989, pp. 182–188. Cf. Drake 1978; Vilain 1996,
chap. 2; Heilbron 2010, pp. 262–263, 270–271; Swerdlow 2013.
⁴ Galilei 1632, pp. 138–143 (stone and tower), 31–32 (perpetual circular motion).
⁵ Galilei 1632, pp. 145–149, 186–188 (citation). As Galileo understood it, the inertial motion from the top of the
tower slightly exceeds the horizontal motion of the lower parts of the tower (since they are closer to the axis of
the rotating earth), so that the falling body should experience a slight deviation to the east; cf. Burstyn 1965. On
anticipations of Galileo’s ship-cabin by Giordano Bruno and others, cf. Capecchi 2014, pp. 158–159.
standing still. In jumping, you will pass on the floor the same spaces as before, nor
will you make larger jumps toward the stern than toward the prow even though the
ship is moving quite rapidly, despite the fact that during the time that you are in the
air the floor under you will be going in a direction opposite to your jump. In throwing
something to your companion, you will need no more force to get it to him whether
he is in the direction of the bow or the stern, with yourself situated opposite. The
droplets will fall as before into the vessel beneath without dropping toward the stern,
although while the drops are in the air the ship runs many spans. The fish in their
water will swim toward the front of their bowl with no more effort than toward the
back, and will go with equal ease to bait placed anywhere around the edges of the
bowl. Finally, the butterflies and flies will continue their flights indifferently toward
every side, nor will it ever happen that they are concentrated toward the stern, as
if tired out from keeping up with the course of the ship, from which they will have
been separated during long intervals by keeping themselves in the air. And if smoke
is made by burning some incense, it will be seen going up in the form of a little cloud,
remaining still and moving no more toward one side than the other. The cause of all
these correspondences of effects is the fact that the ship’s motion is common to all
the things contained in it, and to the air also. That is why I said you should be below
decks; for if this took place above in the open air, which would not follow the course of
the ship, more or less noticeable differences would be seen in some of the effects noted.
No doubt the smoke would fall as much behind as the air itself. The flies likewise, and
the butterflies, held back by the air, would be unable to follow the ship’s motion if
they were separated from it by a perceptible distance. But keeping themselves near
it, they would follow it without effort or hindrance; for the ship, being an unbroken
structure, carries with it a part of the nearby air. For a similar reason we sometimes,
when riding horseback, see persistent flies and horseflies following our horses, flying
now to one part of their bodies and now to another. But the difference would be small
as regards the falling drops, and as to the jumping and the throwing it would be quite
imperceptible.
It is easy to misunderstand the kind of relativity Galileo had in mind here. In Salviati’s
words, “the cause of all these correspondences of effects is that the ship’s motion is common
to all the things contained in it.” This seems to be echoing his earlier remark that the
common reference for the motion of a system of bodies can be arbitrarily changed without
altering the relative motions of these bodies:
It is obvious . . . that motion which is common to many moving things is idle and
inconsequential to the relation of these movables among themselves, nothing being
changed among them, and that it is operative only in the relation that they have with
other bodies lacking that motion, among which their location is changed.
The context of this statement is what we would now call the full observational equiva-
lence between Copernic’s heliocentric system and Tycho’s system in which the same relative
motions are described in an earth-bound frame (to put it in modern terms). The com-
mon motion need not be uniform in this case, whereas Salviati requires his ship to move
uniformly. As he later makes clear, nonuniformity would disturb the similarity of the
phenomena observed in the moving ship and in the anchored ship:
I know that you, Simplicio, have gone from Padua by boat many times, and, if you will
admit the truth of the matter, you have never felt within yourself your participation in
that motion except when the boat has been stopped by running aground or by striking
some obstacle, when you and the other passengers, taken by surprise, have stumbled
perilously.
The point is that a sudden acceleration of the ship is not shared by its passengers, so that
the motion (or rest) of the passengers with respect to the ship is not conserved. A modern
physicist here recognizes the effect of inertia: Galileo implicitly selects the reference frame
so that the principle of inertia holds in it. Namely, he wants the rolling of a ball on a table
or the horizontal motion of a falling stone to be still uniform when the ship is moving.⁶
The Galilean invariance of the other phenomena observed in a moving ship’s cabin is
an experimental fact. In addition, the Galilean invariance of free fall derives from the con-
stancy of horizontal motion and the independence of vertical and horizontal motions in
the earth-based frame. So there is no doubt that Galileo perceives the intimate connection
between the persistence of unimpeded motion and his relativity principle. Still, one should
think twice before identifying his concept of persisting motion with the modern concept of
inertia. In the case of a stone falling from a tower, he regards the horizontal motion as a
natural motion shared with the rotating earth. This motion is circular and not rectilinear
as modern inertia would have it. In the case of a stone falling from the top of a mast in a
moving ship, the horizontal motion is no longer natural but its persistence remains empir-
ically true. As Galileo extrapolates from a ball rolling on a curved horizontal surface, he
regards the persisting motion as circular in this case too.⁷
Yet, when Salviati later discusses the effects of the earth’s rotation on the motion of
a bullet shot by a cannon, he assumes the bullet’s (absolute) motion to be rectilinear and
uniform as long as the effects of gravity and air resistance can be ignored. He is here nearing
the modern concept of inertia, even more so when he espouses the medieval concept of an
inherent tendency to motion, the “impetus,” and denies the orthodox Aristotelian view that
the medium is responsible for the persistence of motion started by human force. In Galileo’s
view, the medium can only impede the motion and the bullet’s motion is conserved as long
as the effects of the medium can be ignored.⁸
Salviati concedes to Simplicio that the kind of relativity he has in mind is not easily
conceived, at least for anyone with a scholastic background: “You are not the first to feel
a great repugnance toward recognizing this nonoperative quality of motion among the
things which share it in common.” This is why Salviati spends so much time arguing that
the conservation of horizontal velocity and the independence of the vertical and horizontal
velocity in free fall imply the fall of a stone along the mast of the moving ship. Sagredo then
notes that the trajectory of the falling stone, as seen from the shore, would be analogous
to the trajectory of a bullet shot from a horizontal cannon. Accordingly, the bullet should
take the same time to reach the ground (which is supposed to be perfectly level) for any
⁶ Galilei 1632, pp. 116, 255.

⁷ Galilei 1632, pp. 142 (stone and tower), 148 (stone and mast).
⁸ Galilei 1632, pp. 178 (cannon), 149–151(medium). Giambattista Benedetti anticipated rectilinear inertia in
1585: cf. Drake and Drabkin 1969, p. 156. On impetus, cf. Drake 1975; Wallace 1981; Capecchi 2014, pp. 63–78.
value of the initial velocity. At first glance, this looks like a proto-application of Galilean
relativity to deriving a law of motion. But this is not quite so because, in order to prove
the fall of the stone along the mast, Salviati has earlier relied on the independence of the
vertical and horizontal motions, which by itself implies Sagredo’s law. All in all, Galileo’s
relativity statement is more a law than a principle.⁹
The laws of free fall

In his response to a classical objection to a rotating earth, Salviati is naturally led to the
consideration of free fall and he repeatedly relies on results earlier established by his friend
“the Academician,” that is, Galileo. For example, Salviati relies on the independence of
the vertical and horizontal components of motion, on the slower fall of a ball rolling on an
inclined plane, on the symmetry of the ascent and descent of a ball shot vertically upward,
and even on the proportionality between the descent and the square of the time of fall from
rest (when Sagredo asks him what would be the trajectory of a body falling with an initial
horizontal velocity).¹⁰
Although Galileo obtained these results early in the century, he published the evidence
very late, in the Discorsi of 1638. In the received scholastic view, a falling body is suddenly
accelerated until it reaches a well-defined velocity. The velocity of fall is proportional to the
weight of the body, and inversely proportional to the density of the medium. Galileo refutes
all these claims by a mixture of reasoning and experimentation. Experiments with inclined
planes and pendulums have convinced him that the velocity and impetus acquired during
the fall depend only on the vertical distance traveled, and that this impetus would bring the
falling body back to its original height if the motion were redirected upward (as occurs for
a pendulum when the bob passes its lowest point). For slightly inclined planes, the fall is
much slower than in free vertical fall, because the traveled distance is much longer. Galileo
was able to measure the time of this fall with a water clock and found it to be proportional
to the square root of the descent. As he understood, the effect of the inclined plane is to
diminish the effective propelling force in a constant proportion (the sine of the inclination),
and the free vertical fall therefore obeys a similar law.¹¹
Galileo then proves that this law implies a constant acceleration of the falling body,
that is, a velocity linearly increasing with the time of descent. For a body launched with a
horizontal velocity, he derives the parabolic shape of the trajectory by composing a uniform
horizontal motion with a constantly accelerated fall. For a body thrown upward or moving
against the slope of an inclined plane, he understands that gravity implies a decrease of the
velocity at a constant rate until reversal at the point of zero velocity.¹²
Galileo’s success in unveiling these simple laws crucially depends on his focus on the
ideal case in which the resistance of the air can be ignored because the density of the falling
⁹ Galilei 1632, pp. 171 (citation), 154–155 (canon).

¹⁰ Galilei 1632, pp. 30–31, 145–149, 163–164, 221–222.
¹¹ Galilei 1638, pp. 105–106 (scholastics), 205 (inclined plane), 206–207 (pendulum), 212–213 (experiment).
¹² Galilei 1638, pp. 208–210 (acceleration law), 268–308 (parabola), 200–201 (upward free motion), 243–245
(upward motion on inclined plane).
body is sufficiently large and the time of fall is sufficiently small. Also, he refrains from
speculating on the cause of the acceleration and rather computes and measures its effects.
He knows only that some “mutual cooperation of the parts” or some “concordant instinct
and natural tendency” is responsible for the rotundity of the earth, the moon, the sun, and
the planets, for the weight and fall of objects near their surface, and perhaps even for the
velocity of the earth and planets around the sun (if this velocity results from a fall from a
fixed solar distance).¹³
As for the effect of the weight of bodies on their fall, Galileo claims that sufficiently
dense bodies all fall with the same velocity, irrespective of their weight. Whether or not
he dropped objects from the top of the Tower of Pisa, he could easily verify this law for
constrained fall on an inclined plane or with a pendulum. In the Discorsi, he also reasons
that the contrary assumption of a faster fall of heavier bodies would lead to a logical con-
tradiction: on the one hand, the compound body formed by attaching a heavy body to a
light body should fall at an intermediate speed because the light body slows down the heavy
one; on the other hand, as the weight of the compound body is greater than the weight of
its two components, it should fall faster than both of them. This reasoning has sometimes
been regarded as a piece of sophistry, because it would for instance imply that all elec-
tric charges should move at the same speed in a given uniform electric field. The objection
is invalid because Galileo assumes the speed of fall depends on weight only, whereas the
acceleration of an electric charge depends on two parameters, charge and mass. That two
different parameters, inertial mass and gravitational mass, might also apply to free fall was
not an option in Galileo’s context of reasoning: even though he rejected the Aristotelian
proportionality between speed of fall and weight, he conserved the weaker assumption that
the speed of fall depends on weight only. Quite often, the singularity of Galileo’s reasoning
in our eyes depends on his being at an intermediate stage between Aristotle and Newton.¹⁴
The definition of motion

What is now called “motion” truly was moto locale or movimiento locale, in order to avoid
confusion with the broader Aristotelian concept of motion, which includes any change
of state. In Il Saggiatore (1623), Galileo made clear that he regarded the kind of motion
implied in change of place as more definite and less subjective than changes in other per-
ceived properties of bodies. He even flirted with the atomist idea of reducing the latter
properties (secondary qualities) to the shape, size, and motion of atoms. At any rate, he
was mostly concerned with astronomy and mechanics in which the narrower concept of
motion is dominant.¹⁵
¹³ Galilei 1638, pp. 275–277 (idealization), p. 202 (cause unknown); Galilei 1632, pp. 33–34 (universal attraction),
pp. 20–21, 29 (velocity of planets).
¹⁴ Galilei 1638, pp. 128–129 (pendulums), 107–108 (compound body). Galileo restricts his reasoning to bodies
made of the same material, presumably because otherwise the Archimedean push would not be a constant fraction
of the weight. But he believes the result to extend to all bodies (ibid. pp. 116–117). On the alleged sophistry, see,
for example, Hacyan 2015.
¹⁵ Galilei 1623, pp. 275–276 [Drake transl.]. Cf. Drake and O’Malley 1960, pp. 310–311.
In the Dialogo, Galileo made clear that for him place and motion were defined with re-
spect to a concrete body or system of bodies considered at rest: it could be a ship, the
earth, or the sun together with the fixed stars. For free motion referred to a spherical
body like the earth, he assumed constant acceleration toward the center as well as uni-
form circular motion around the center. For free motion referred to distant bodies (the
sun and fixed stars), he assumed uniform rectilinear motion. He thus subverted the distinc-
tion between natural and violent motion, and he denied the essential role of the medium
in the Aristotelian understanding of these two kinds of motion. That said, his concept
of free motion remained tied to the natural distribution of matter in the world, and he
did not give a complete theory of motion that could serve as the foundation of a new
physics.¹⁶
1.2 Beeckman and Descartes on free fall

As stated in the previous paragraph, for Galileo the place of an object is defined with respect
to a concrete reference body. For Aristotle, the place (τóπoϛ) of an object is the touching
surface of the medium in which it is immersed; and change of place, or locomotion, depends
on the properties of this medium. For both thinkers, there is no concept of empty space as
a container in which objects are placed and can move. The word “space” (χῶρoϛ, διάστημα,
spazio), whenever it occurs, refers to room or interval between concrete bodies.¹⁷
The modern concept of empty space as an immovable receptacle of objects has roots
in ancient Greek atomism and also in peripatetic criticism of Aristotle’s concept of mo-
tion (e.g., by Aristotle’s definition, the spinning of a globe does not seem to involve any
motion). In the late Renaissance, this new concept of space penetrated the writings of Fran-
ciscus Patricius, Giordano Bruno, and Tommaso Campanella. In the seventeenth century,
it prospered in the neo-atomist hands of Isaac Beeckman in the Netherlands and Pierre
Gassendi in France. For an atomist philosopher, the world is made of atoms traveling
through emptiness, and it becomes natural to define space as the immovable container of
matter.¹⁸
Space, being empty, is also homogeneous and nonsubstantial. Consequently, an atom
originally at rest must remain at rest and an atom originally in motion must keep moving in
the same direction with the same velocity until a collision with another atom occurs. Both
Beeckman and Gassendi asserted the persistence of motion in empty space. As Beeckman
put it in 1614: “The mind conceives very easily that in a vacuum motion never turns to
rest because there is no cause to alter the motion: indeed, nothing can be changed without
some cause of change.” By a similar argument, the direction of motion in a vacuum can-
not change because nothing can cause this change. Beeckman and Gassendi nonetheless
¹⁶ Galilei 1632, pp. 115–117. As Edmund Halley asserted in 1718 from an unreliable comparison between ancient
Greek and Tycho’s observations, and as Jacques Cassini definitely proved in 1738, the so-called fixed stars actually
move (Halley 1718; Cassini 1738; cf. Verbunt and van der Sluys 2019).
¹⁷ Cf. Jammer 1954, chap. 1.
¹⁸ Jammer 1954, chaps. 2–3; De Risi 2015.
BEECKMAN AND DESCARTES ON FREE FALL 9
maintained the naturalness of circular motion (around the sun and around the center of
the earth) and thus did not quite reach the modern concept of rectilinear inertia.¹⁹
Beeckman also had an interest in free fall, well before Galileo published his views on
this topic. Beeckman believed (rectilinear) inertia played a fundamental role in this process.
In June 1618, he entered the following remark in his diary:
Here is the reason why two motions are compounded [for a falling stone]: firstly, there
is the natural motion downwards; secondly, the stone, once set in motion, persists in
its motion, and the natural motion again adds to this motion.
This idea is similar to Galileo’s composition of horizontal inertial motion and vertical ac-
celerated motion in the case of a horizontally shot bullet. Later in the same year, Beeckman
asked young René Descartes, then in Breda as a mercenary for the Dutch army, to deter-
mine the law of free fall based on this idea. A portion of Descartes’s reply is recorded in a
letter to Marin Mersenne of November 1629:
Firstly, I assume that the motion impressed on a body goes on forever unless it is
removed by some other cause. That is to say, once [a body] has been set in motion, it
will keep moving forever with equal velocity. Now suppose that a weight at A is pulled
by its gravity toward C. As soon as it has begun to move, if its gravity is suppressed,
it will nevertheless persist in the same motion until it reaches C, and it will descend
from A to B at the same speed as from B to C [A, B, and C are three vertically aligned
points, with AB = BC]. Since in reality gravity keeps acting and adds new downward
forces at each successive instant, the body must travel much faster in BC than in AB
because while moving in BC it retains all the impetus of its motion in AB and in
addition it keeps acquiring new impetus by gravity.
Descartes goes on with a false deduction of the time ratios for the successive intervals
AB and BC. What matters to us is the recourse to a principle of inertia as well as the
superposition of previously acquired and newly impressed motion. Note that for Beeckman
and Descartes the superposition concerns parallel, vertical velocities, whereas for Galileo
a horizontal inertial motion is combined with a vertical fall.²⁰
A month later, Descartes communicated to Mersenne his proof of the linear increase of
velocity of a falling body:
In the first moment, the velocity one is impressed by gravity; then again the velocity
one in the second moment, and so forth. One in the first moment and one in the second
moment makes two; and one in the third moment makes three, so that the velocity
increases in arithmetic proportion. I thought I had sufficiently proved this from the
fact that gravity acts permanently. . . . Suppose, for example, that a plumb mass falls by
¹⁹ Beeckman 1939–1953, Vol. 1, pp. 24–25. On Beeckman, cf. Arthur 2007; van Berkel and Ultee 2013. On
Gassendi, cf. Pav 1966; Fischer 2014.
²⁰ Beeckman 1939, Vol. 1, p. 174; Descartes to Mersenne, November 13, 1629, in Adam and Tannery 1897,
pp. 72 (citation, mostly in Latin and probably taken from a manuscript of 1619), 75 (Tannery on the Beeckman
connection). Cf. Bouasse 1895, pp. 103–105; Jouguet 1908, Vol. 1, pp. 81–82; Damerow et al. 1992; Richard 2007.
As noted by Damerow et al., Jean Buridan anticipated Beeckman’s approach.
the force of gravity and that, after the first moment of fall, God withholds all gravity
from the plumb. Then this mass keeps going down in a vacuum because it has been
set in motion and because no reason can be given why its velocity would increase; but
it cannot decrease either (remember that I suppose that once [a body] has been set in
motion, it will move forever in a vacuum; and I will prove it in my treatise). If after
some time God restitutes gravity to the plumb for an equal moment, and then again
withholds gravity, the force of gravity will pull the plumb as much as it did during the
first moment, so that the velocity of the motion is doubled.
Again, the proof probably dates from 1618, when Descartes was under the influence of
Beeckman’s atomism. Descartes was then assuming vacuum, inertial motion in a vacuum,
and the mutual independence of the impressed and inertial motions.²¹
In 1631, Descartes told Mersenne that he no longer held the third of these assumptions:
I not only assumed a vacuum, but I also assumed that the moving force . . . was acting
in an always equal manner, which openly conflicts with the laws of Nature: indeed all
natural powers act to a larger or smaller extent according as the object is more or less
disposed to receive their action; and it is certain that a stone is not equally disposed
to receive a new motion, or a velocity increase, when it is already moving very rapidly
and when it is moving very slowly.
When, a year later, Descartes became aware of Galileo’s Dialogo, he disagreed with the
universality of free fall as well as with Galileo’s treatment of fall with an initial horizontal
velocity. He never published his early rational deduction of the law of constant acceleration,
since he had ceased to believe in its truth. As we are about to see, in his mature philosophy
the accelerating effect of a force on a body had to depend on its initial velocity.²²
1.3 Descartes’s world

While Descartes was reporting to Mersenne his old reply to Beeckman’s query on free fall,
he was also writing an ambitious treatise, Le monde, propounding a new mechanical phi-
losophy to supplant Aristotle’s system. From Beeckman he retained the corpuscles, their
inertia, and their collisions, but he strongly rejected the concept of empty space at the heart
of neo-atomism. In Descartes’ world, any spatial extension is matter, and vice versa. The
infinite world is made of contiguous rigid figures of various shape: the gross particles of
ordinary matter (third element), contiguous balls between the former particles (second el-
ement), and dust filling the remaining interstices (first element). These corpuscles or rigid
figures possess no quality other than their shape and extension. They move with respect
to each other in a perpetual rearrangement implying mutual collisions. There is no ab-
solute, empty space. Motion, in common parlance, being referred to a large rigid body
(most frequently the earth), is ill-defined since the world contains many rigid assemblies
²¹ Descartes to Mersenne, December 18, 1629, in Adam and Tannery 1897, pp. 88–90 (in Latin).
²² Descartes to Mersenne, October or November 1631, in Adam and Tannery 1897, p. 230; November or
December 1632, ibid. p. 261; 14 Aug. 1634, ibid. pp. 304–305.
DESCARTES’S WORLD 11
of corpuscles that could serve as reference bodies. This is why Descartes defines the true
motion of a body as motion with respect to adjacent bodies:²³
If, instead of settling on a notion founded on ordinary usage only, we wish to know
what is motion in truth, we shall say, for the sake of determinateness, that motion is
the transport of a portion of matter or of a body from the vicinity of those that touch
it immediately.
From God’s immutability, Descartes derives the global conservation of this motion as
well as the tendency of individual particles to preserve their rest or their motion. This leads
him to three “laws of nature”:²⁴
(1) Every thing remains in its state of being as long as nothing changes it.
(2) Every moving body tends to continue its motion on a straight line.
(3) If a moving body encounters a stronger body, it does not lose any of its motion; if
a moving body encounters a weaker one that it may move, the former body loses as
much motion as it gives to the latter.
A modern reader of Descartes may be tempted to conflate the two first laws with our prin-
ciple of inertia, and the third with the conservation of momentum or of kinetic energy
in a collision. These guesses are deeply incompatible with Descartes’s true meaning. First,
Descartes’s statement of the persistence of rest and motion should not be confused with the
modern principle of inertia, because in his system the rest and motion of a body are defined
with respect to the adjacent corpuscles, not with respect to an abstract immovable space.
In particular, Descartes explains the rigidity of a macroscopic body by persistence of the
mutual rest of its particles, and fluidity by the constant, erratic motion of the particles of
the fluid. Second, the proposition that a larger particle remains at rest when impacted by a
smaller particle contradicts our conservation of momentum (yet for Descartes it is compat-
ible with the contrary behavior of macroscopic bodies, because the medium contributes to
this behavior). Third, Descartes’s idea that in a collision one particle loses as much motion
as the other gains does not agree with any modern conservation law, because he measures
the motion of a particle by volume times velocity modulus.
Descartes’s original definition of true motion has important consequences. First, the
earth and the planets do not have any true motion, because they are at rest with respect to
the subtle matter in which they bathe:
Properly speaking, [motion] is only the transport of a body from the vicinity of those
that touch it. . . . In earth and the other planets no motion in the proper sense can
be found, because they are not transported from the vicinity of the parts of the sky
that touch them. . . . If we seem to attribute some motion to the earth, we should
think that we do so improperly, in the same way as we sometimes say that those who
sleep and rest in a ship nonetheless travel from Calais to Dover, owing to the ship that
carry them.
²³ Descartes [1633]; 1644, p. 140.

²⁴ Descartes 1644, pp. 150–156. Cf. Garber 1992; Vilain 1996, pp. 60–67.
In Descartes’ cosmology, the sun is surrounded by a huge vortex of subtle matter that drags
the earth and the planets circularly around it. Within this vortex, he imagines smaller vor-
tices around the earth and the planets. The latter vortices are responsible for the spinning
of the planets and for the rotation of their moons around them. There is no relative motion
between a planet and the adjacent parts of these vortices.²⁵
With this mechanism, Descartes could accommodate the relative motion (in the ordi-
nary sense) assumed by Copernicus or Tycho for celestial bodies, and still pretend that
the earth did not truly move, in conformity with the teachings of the Church. In addi-
tion, his system immediately explained why a rotation of the earth with respect to the
fixed stars does not have any effect on the motion of bodies near the surface of the
earth: the earth is constantly at rest with respect to the neighboring fluid matter (sub-
tle or not) on which this motion depends. Descartes thus satisfied a Mach relativity in
which the relative motion of a system of bodies does not depend on a common motion
imparted to these bodies and to the surrounding fluids. Indeed, at the fundamental level
of his elements, corpuscular inertia and collisions depend only on relative distances and
motions.²⁶
Accordingly, the motion of a projectile with respect to the earth should not depend
on the motion of the earth. In contrast this motion depends on the projectile’s progress
through the medium (air and subtle matter). In the absence of gravity and air resis-
tance, Descartes expects any preexisting motion of the projectile to be continued on
a straight line with a constant velocity. Indeed, his first and second laws imply recti-
linear uniform motion with respect to the medium. At the same time, he expects the
accelerating effect of gravity to depend on the initial velocity of the projectile, per-
haps because according to his collision rules the momentum acquired by impact (of the
corpuscles of the medium on the corpuscles of the projectile) depends on the initial ve-
locity of the impacted body. This may explain why he abandoned his early derivation of
the law of constant acceleration in free fall and why he questioned Galileo’s superposi-
tion of a constant horizontal motion and a vertical acceleration for a horizontally shot
projectile.
However, Descartes does not truly explain gravity through corpuscular collisions. In his
system, what causes gravity is the disparity of the centrifugal forces on ordinary matter and
on subtle matter. A weighing body rotates together with the earth and is therefore subjected
to an upward centrifugal force. The subtle matter permeating and surrounding this body
is subjected to a stronger centrifugal force because in order to keep the earth rotating the
celestial vortex must rotate faster than the earth. While the subtle matter moves upward
under the effect of its higher centrifugal force, the ordinary matter must move downward
to fill the resulting vacuum.²⁷
²⁵ Descartes 1644, pp. 194, 195, 197–198. In effect, Descartes defines the true motion of a body as motion with
respect to the average position of contiguous bodies. This precision is necessary in the case of planets because the
celestial corpuscles must be in constant motion for the sky to be a liquid.
²⁶ For Mach’s kind of relativity, see pp. 68–70, this volume.
²⁷ Descartes 1644, pp. 345–347.
NEWTON’S LAWS OF MOTION 13
There are many problems with this fanciful mechanism. First, the faster rotation of
subtle matter seems to contradict Descartes’s earlier statement that the earth does not have
any true motion.²⁸ Second, centrifugal force is incompatible with Descartes’s own concept
of inertia, which concerns true motion only (not motion with respect to a distant body).²⁹
Third, it is hard to imagine how centrifugal force could have spherically symmetric effects.³⁰
Still, we may try to imagine what Descartes would have replied to Simplicio when asked
about the stone falling from a tower on a rotating earth: on a non-rotating earth there
would be no gravity, and therefore the stone would not even fall; on a rotating earth, the
stone should fall vertically because centrifugal force is directed from the center and because,
when convenient, Descartes ignores the differential rotation he assumes between the earth
and the surrounding vortex.
Descartes easily impressed some of his contemporaries through the beautifully simple
basis of his mechanical philosophy: collisions between the corpuscles of a fragmented ex-
tension, under rules derived from God’s immutability. Yet, in order to fill the gap between
this corpuscular foundation and observed phenomena, he frequently appealed to concrete
analogies that were not necessarily compatible with the foundations. For instance, he jus-
tified centrifugal force in the vortex around the earth by analogy with a stone in a rotating
catapult.³¹ He overlooked an essential difference between the two cases: the stone moves
through the surrounding medium, whereas corpuscles in the vortex have no true motion.
According to his own principle of inertia, there should be a centrifugal force in the first case
but not in the second. Such inconsistencies make it difficult to judge how much relativity
there is in Descartes’s system. On the one hand, his foundations imply the absence of effect
of any common motion on the relative motions in a system. On the other hand, his cosmic
centrifugal force implies an effect of common rotation.
1.4 Newton’s laws of motion

Collisions
For the neo-atomists and for Descartes, collisions between corpuscles were in principle re-
sponsible for every evolution of the world. The laws of collision therefore had basic import.
Beeckman regarded his atoms as completely inelastic hard bodies, in which case two collid-
ing atoms move in tandem after collision. In addition, he assumed the product of velocity
and corporeity (corporeitas) to be conserved when a moving body collides with a body at
rest. For instance, a moving body colliding with an equal body at rest communicates half
its velocity to the double body formed by collision (in analogy with a lever: the same force
is needed to raise a given weight at a given speed as is needed to raise double the weight
at half this speed). In a frontal collision in which two equal bodies meet with equal and
²⁸ Descartes 1644, p. 131, Descartes suggests that the orthoradial motions of the various corpuscles of the
medium compensate for each other.
²⁹ A similar criticism is found in Newton [c. 1668?].
³⁰ This objection is found, for example, in a letter to Descartes written in 1649 by Henry More (More 1712, pp.
97–98).
³¹ Descartes 1644, pp. 221–222. On Descartes’s analogies, cf. Galison 1984.
opposed velocities, the two motions cancel each other out. Beeckman was thus groping
toward the relation
m1 ῡ1 + m2 ῡ2 = (m1 + m2 )ῡ′ (1.1)
for momentum conservation, where m1 and m2 are the masses of the two colliding inelastic
bodies, ῡ1 and ῡ2 their (algebraic) initial velocities, and ῡ′ their final common velocity. This
relation implies a constant loss of motion in the universe, which Beeckman’s benevolent
God compensated for by providing the early universe with an infinite stock of motion.³²
Descartes’s collision rules were more numerous and harder to grasp. They were meant
to comply with his special concept of inertia and also to preserve the global amount of mo-
tion (measured by spatial extension times velocity modulus) that God gave to this world.
They were purely rational and not meant to apply to macroscopic bodies, whereas Beeck-
man’s rules applied to binding collisions between concrete bodies. Like Descartes but in an
atomist framework, Gassendi distinguished between conservative micro-laws for the col-
lision and combination of atoms, and more complex laws for macroscopic bodies. Early
mechanical philosophy easily ignored the “analogy of nature” later promoted by Newton
between the micro- and macro-worlds.³³
The young Isaac Newton appreciated the neo-atomism of Gassendi’s British follower
Walter Charleton and found much to criticize in Descartes’s grand system. He adopted
the concept of matter as made of immutable and indivisible particles moving in absolute
empty space, and he rejected Descartes’s identification of matter with extension as con-
tradicting the immateriality and omnipresence of God. He knew and read the Cambridge
neo-Platonist theologian Henry More, who, while he promoted Descartes’s mechanical
philosophy, alienated it with the “Spirit of Nature,” an omnipresent, infinitely extended
and “indescerpible” (indivisible) emanation of God responsible for the immortality of the
soul and also for gravity. While More generally approved of the Cartesian endeavor to ex-
plain physical and celestial phenomena by matter and God-given motion, he denied that
the fall of a stone could be explained by mechanical power alone: an immaterial entity or
force had to be implied.³⁴
Between neo-atomism and spiritualized Cartesianism, Newton saw the importance of
knowing the laws of collision between bodies. He gave his own theory of impact in notes
written around 1665. The two first axioms in the relevant section of his “Wastebook” read:
1) If a quantity once move it will never rest unlesse hindered by some externall caus{e.}
2) A quantity will always move on in the same streight line (not changing the determi-
nation {nor} celerity of its motion) unlesse some externall cause divert it.
³² Beeckman 1939, Vol. 1, pp. 265–266 (November–December 1918). Cf. Arthur 2007. On pre-Newtonian
collision rules and analogy with the lever, cf. Bertoloni Meli 2006, chap. 5.
³³ Gassendi’s atoms had an inherent velocity, whose modulus remained the same after collision (cf. Pav 1966, pp.
31–32).
³⁴ Newton [1668?]; More 1659, preface (Spirit), pp. 449–458 (gravity). Cf. Westfall 1962; Henry 2016.
Although these axioms seem reminiscent of Descartes’s first two laws of motion, their
meaning is different because the motion is now referred to “Extension,” regarded as an
abstract empty space: “When a body Quantity {passeth} from one parte of Extension to
another it is saide to mo{ve}.”³⁵
Newton also differs from Descartes by assuming a concept of force or pressure as the
cause of motion. For the French philosopher, the only direct cause of motion is impact
between absolutely rigid bodies, and “force” refers to the tendency of a body to persist in
its state of rest or motion (Newton’s later vis insita); for Newton, (impulsive) force mediates
between the two colliding bodies. Force is defined as what causes a body originally at rest to
assume a given amount of motion, or (with sign reversed) what causes a body to stop when
initially in motion: “There is exactly required so much & noe more force to reduce a body to
rest as there was {to} put it {in a give}n motion.” Like Descartes and Beeckman, Newton
measures the motion by the product of size and velocity (matter, at its most fundamental,
has uniform, constant density), and therefore measures a force by the quantity of motion
it can produce (or suppress). In his view, force and quantity of motion are directional (they
have a “determination”) and their relationship is the geometric counterpart of the modern
vector formula I = Δ(mv) relating the impulsive force I to the variation of the momentum
mv of the body to which this force is applied. In addition, Newton assumes the equality of
action and reaction; that is to say, the force I12 acting from body 1 to body 2 is equal and
opposed to the force I21 acting from body 2 to body 1:
If two quantitys (a & b) move towards one another & meete in o, Then the difference of
theire motion shall not bee lost nor loose its determination. For at their occursion they
presse equally uppon one another, & (p) therefore one must loose noe more motion
than the other doth; soe that the difference of their motions cannot be destroyed.
In symbols, this statement reads
m1 v1 + m2 v2 = m1 v1′ + m1 v2 ′ since m1 v1′ – m1 v1 = I21 = –I12 = m2 v2 – m2 v2 ′. (1.2)
We do not know how Newton arrived at this reasoning. He may have regarded the equality
of action and reaction as an obvious consequence of the impossibility of perpetual motion
(as he later did in the Principia), or he may have derived it from the observed conservation
of the vector quantity of motion in real collisions.³⁶
In order to determine the final velocities of frontally colliding elastic spheres, Newton
further assumes the reversal of the relative velocity during the collision (Axioms 10–11).
This is obvious in the case of a symmetric collision between two equal spheres moving
toward each other with opposite velocities, because, as Newton explains, the local spring-
like compression beginning when the spheres first meet must be followed by a symmetric
dilation until the spheres separate. Newton extends this result to any asymmetric collision
(with different masses and different velocity moduli), without any explanation (I am not
³⁵ Newton [c. 1665], f. 10v. Cf. Herivel 1965; Westfall 1980, pp. 145–148. On the origins of Newton’s concept of
space, cf. De Risi 2015.
³⁶ Newton [c. 1665], ff. 10v, 11r.
aware of any simple intuitive justification). He also treats the case of arbitrary shaped and
rotating bodies.³⁷
Principia Mathematica
Most importantly, Newton already has in hand the three laws of motion he will state as
follows in the Principia of 1687:
1) Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless
it is compelled to change that state by forces impress’d thereon.
2) The alteration of motion is ever proportional to the motive force impress’d; and is
made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impress’d.
3) To every action there is always an opposed and an equal reaction: or the mutual
actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary
parts.
As is clear from Newton’s comments and from the way he applies these laws, the implied
“forces” truly are impulses or integrals of time-dependent forces over time (the impressed
force is proportional to the added momentum “whether that force is impressed all at once,
or gradually and successively”). When Newton, later in the Principia, investigates the mo-
tion of a planet continuously attracted by the sun, he replaces this attraction with a series
of impulses and analyzes the motion of the planet as a rapid alternation of inertial motions
and momentum jumps caused by the impulses. Note that if the second law were directly
enunciated as the acceleration law f = mr̈, then the first law would be superfluous: it would
be a special case of the second law for f = 0. Newton’s formulation thus reflects the discrete,
collision-like character of basic interactions he remotely inherited from Beeckman.³⁸
In deliberate opposition to Descartes’s and More’s rationalism, Newton insists that the
true foundation of his laws of motion is empirical: they are inferred from the empirical laws
of collision and from Galileo’s empirical laws of free fall. At the same time, he clearly sees
that these laws presuppose a few definitions and conventions, which he expounds at the
very beginning of his treatise, in a series of definitions regarding matter, motion, force, and
their measures, followed by a scholium on space, time, and motion. Most fundamentally,
in order that the first law make any sense, the reference of the motion must be specified.
This reference is what Newton now calls absolute space: an imagined, unbounded, rigid
body, through which material bodies freely move, and regarded as immobile. In Newton’s
parlance, “Absolute Space, in its own nature, without regard to any thing external, remains
always similar and immoveable.” Unlike relative spaces bound to rigid material bodies,
absolute space is not detectable by the senses. We may nonetheless detect absolute rotation
through centrifugal forces curving the surface of water in a bucket or stretching a string
between two globes. Absolute uniform translation is not detectable, as Newton expresses
in the fifth corollary to his laws of motion:
³⁷ Newton [c. 1665], f. 11r.

³⁸ Newton 1687, pp. 12–13; 1729, Book I, pp. 19–20 (citation). On the Principia, cf. Smeenk and Schliesser 2013.
The motions of bodies included in a given space are the same among themselves
[inter se] whether that space is at rest, or moves uniformly forwards in a right line
without any circular motion.
This is a direct consequence of the laws of motion, granted that the forces are the same in
the two compared spaces. As Newton notes in a probable allusion to Galileo, the motions
observed on a moving ship confirm this invariance.³⁹
Newton’s next corollary, the sixth, reads:
If bodies moved in any manner among themselves, are urged in the direction of paral-
lel lines by equal accelerative forces, they will all continue to move among themselves,
after the same manner as if they had not been urged by those forces.
In other words, if a force like uniform gravity equally accelerates all the bodies of a system,
and if other forces simultaneously act on these bodies, their relative motion will be the
same as if the former accelerative force did not exist. This is an obvious consequence of
the second law: if, in anachronistic notation, g denotes the common acceleration (owing to
gravity), mi the mass of the body i, fi the additional force acting on it, we have
fi fj
fi + mi g = mi r̈i ⇒ r̈i – r̈j = – , (1.3)
m i mj
so that the relative motion does not depend on the uniform gravity g. The modern reader
here recognizes Einstein’s free-falling elevator, in which mechanical experiments yield the
same result as they would if the elevator were at rest in zero gravity—as long as the inertial
and gravitational masses are confounded.⁴⁰
Why would Newton introduce this relativity with respect to common acceleration? He
uses it in his proof of Proposition 3 of Book I:
Every body, that by a radius drawn to the centre of another body, however moved,
describes areas about that centre proportional to the time, is urged by a force com-
pounded of the centripetal force tending to that other body, and of all the accelerative
force by which that other body is impelled.
Using the sixth corollary, the acceleration of the second body can be subtracted from both
bodies without altering the relative motion and its constant areal velocity. The second
body is then at rest (or in uniform rectilinear motion) and Newton can rely on his previous
proposition, which states the central character of a force for which the area law is satisfied
when the center is fixed in absolute space. In Book III about the “System of the World,”
Newton relies on Proposition 3 of Book I to derive the central character of the action of
Jupiter on its moons from the areal property of the observed motion of these moons. He
³⁹ Newton 1687, pp. 6–7, 9–11, 19; 1729, Book I, pp. 9 (citation), 15–18, 30 (citation). Cf. Westfall 1980, pp.
417–420. On Newton’s views on space, time, and motion, cf. Rynasiewicz 2014.
⁴⁰ Newton 1687, p. 20; 1729, Book I, p. 31. Cf. Stein 1977, p. 19; Torretti 1983, p. 19; Barbour 2001, pp. 577–578;
Saunders 2013, pp. 34–39; Smeenk and Schliesser 2013, pp. 124–125.
needs this proposition because Jupiter and its moons are all attracted by the sun and thus
subjected to a common acceleration. Of course Newton understands that the equality of
all the accelerations caused by the sun depends on the equality of inertial and gravitational
mass. He notes that even a tiny difference between these two masses would visibly distort
the orbits of Jupiter’s satellites.⁴¹
Newton’s two relativity statements were potential threats to his idea of absolute space.
Formally, if the laws of motion are true in a given space, they will be so in any space moving
rectilinearly and uniformly with respect to the former space. They will even be true in a
rectilinearly accelerated space, if only a very remote huge mass is imagined as the cause
of this acceleration. In practice, Newton imagined two means of determining the absolute
space: through the absence of centrifugal forces, and through the motion of the center of
mass of a closed system. As a consequence of his three laws of motion, the center of mass
of a system of mutually interacting bodies (ignoring interactions with any external body)
should move with constant velocity. By a natural “hypothesis,” Newton deems absolute
the space in which the center of mass of the solar system (better: of the entire universe) is
at rest and in which the stars are seen in fixed directions. Yet he is aware that according
to his sixth corollary a global rectilinear acceleration of the solar system would have no
observable effect:⁴²
It may be alleged that the sun and planets are impelled by some other force equally
and in the direction of parallel lines, but by such a force (by Cor. vi of the Laws of
Motion) no change would happen in the situation of the planets one to another, nor
any sensible effect follow: but our business is with the causes of sensible effects. Let
us, therefore, neglect every such force as imaginary and precarious, and of no use in
the phenomena of the heavens.
Absolute time is another mathematical abstraction: “By its own nature [it] flows equably
without regard to anything external.” The way it differs from the time empirically given by
the periods of celestial bodies must be determined by applying the laws of motion to these
bodies.⁴³
Force is the third basic concept appearing in the laws of motion. Newton defines the
force appearing in his second law as follows:
An impressed force is an action exerted upon a body, in order to change its state, either
of rest, or of moving uniformly forward in a right line.
When measured by the quantity of motion (momentum) it may produce or destroy, an

impressed force (such as gravity) is called motive force. With this definition, the second law
almost sounds like a tautology. Yet it is not, since force is defined as a cause of motion to
⁴¹ Newton 1687, pp. 39 (Prop. 3), 402 (Hyp. 5), 405 (Prop. 1); Newton 1729, Book I, p. 62 (citation); Book III,
pp. 206 (Prop. 1), 213 (Phen. 1), 221–223 (equivalence).
⁴² Newton 1687, pp. 402, 417; 1729, Book III, p. 232; citation from 1728 draft of Book III, in Cajori 1962, Vol.
2, p. 558.
⁴³ Newton 1687, pp. 5, 7; 1729, Book I, pp. 9 (citation), 11.
HUYGENS’S MECHANICS 19
be found in external circumstances, and since the second law further implies the stability
and consistency of the measurement of the motive force through the induced momentum
variation. That is to say, the momentum acquired by a test body under a given force should
not depend on its mass or on its initial velocity.⁴⁴
For a continually impressed force, induced momentum is not the only way Newton
knows of measuring the motive force. Another way is to balance the force statically with
another force that is a multiple of a given unit force. The principle of such static measure-
ment is (a special case of) the parallelogram of forces, according to which two forces acting
conjointly on the same point are equivalent to a single force given by their vector sum. This
is why Newton’s two first corollaries to his laws of motion are devoted to the parallelogram
of force and the derived laws of statics (then called mechanics). The first corollary reads:
A body by two forces conjoined will describe the diagonal of a parallelogram, in the
same time that it would describe the sides, by those forces apart.
Here again the forces are meant to be impulsive. Newton implicitly assumes that the two
conjoined impulses have the same effect whether they are applied simultaneously or with a
slight delay. Then, by the second law the momentum induced by the second impulse adds
vectorially to the momentum induced by the first impulse, as required by the parallelogram
law. We thus see that in the context of impulsive forces or of forces reducible to a rapid
succession of impulses, Newton’s second law is intimately related to the parallelogram of
forces.⁴⁵
Newton’s definitions of space, time, and force will prove important in later attempts
to justify or derive his laws of motion. For the moment, it is sufficient to remember that
together with the laws of motion they imply two relativity theorems: a first theorem ac-
cording to which the relative motions of a system of bodies obey the same laws whether
they are referred to absolute space or to a uniformly and rectilinearly moving space; and
another theorem according to which the relative motions of a system of bodies under given
forces are unaffected when a uniform gravity acts on the bodies in addition to these forces.
The first theorem justifies Galileo’s empirical law or relativity. The second theorem is en-
tirely new and replaces Galileo’s and others’ notion of circular inertia in explaining why,
for example, the circulation of the moon around the earth is not affected by the circulation
of the earth–moon system around the sun.
1.5 Huygens’s mechanics

Collisions
Let us return to the 1660s. Newton was not alone in reflecting about collisions in those
years. The newly founded Royal Society pursued the topic from 1666, and in 1668 its
⁴⁴ Newton 1687, pp. 2, 4; 1729, Book I, 3 (citation), 7–9. Cf. Jammer 1957, chap. 7.
⁴⁵ Newton 1687, pp. 3–4; 1729, Book I, p. 7 (“The weight [as motive force] is ever known by the quantity of a
force equal and contrary to it, that is just sufficient to hinder the descent of the body”), p. 21 (citation).
curator Robert Hooke invited three renowned geometers, Christiaan Huygens, Christo-
pher Wren, and John Wallis, to communicate their collision rules. Wren dealt with strictly
hard bodies (i.e., soft from the modern point of view) and obtained the correct laws through
momentum conservation (which he guessed by analogy with the principle of virtual veloc-
ities, just as Beeckman had privately done some forty years earlier). Wallis obtained the
correct laws for elastic collisions by semi-empirical reasoning. The Royal Society failed to
publish Huygens’s submission, which contained the same laws. Huygens had privately de-
duced them in 1652 from three principles: rectilinear inertia, Galilean relativity, and the
impossibility of perpetual motion (together with Galileo’s laws of free fall). In 1661 he had
performed and explained a few simple cases of collisions between pendulum bobs in front
of a London audience including Wallis and Wren.⁴⁶
In his approach, Huygens starts with a restricted class of collisions in which the rules are
evident enough, and extends this class by making the restricted collisions happen on a mov-
ing boat and considering them from the shore. He does so in a vivid manner, imagining a
boat moving along the bank of a canal, one gentleman in the boat holding two pendulums
and communicating contrary velocities to their bobs, the other gentleman gently accompa-
nying the motion of his friend’s hands with his own hands (Figure 1.1). Huygens’s account
is here modernized for the convenience of today’s readers.⁴⁷
A first obvious case is the symmetric collision between two equal bodies (elastic balls).
Seen from the boat, the collision amounts to a sign change of the two equal velocities. Seen
from the shore, it provides the rule for any frontal collision between equal bodies, since any
values of the two initial velocities can be obtained by properly choosing the boat’s velocity
and the invariant measure of the relative velocity. More generally, Huygens observes that
Fig. 1.1. Pendulum collisions induced and observed by two gentlemen, one on a river bank, the other on a
boat. From Huygens 1703, p. 369.
⁴⁶ Wallis 1668; Wren 1668. Cf. Jouguet 1908, Vol. 1, chap. 2; Volgraff 1929a.
⁴⁷ Huygens 1669 (for the results), 1703 (for the proof). Cf. Gabbey 1980; Vilain 1996, chap. 4.
HUYGENS’S MECHANICS 21
for any collision between two bodies of initial velocities v1 and v2 , there is a velocity u of
the boat for which the relative velocity of the first body simply changes sign:
1
v1′ – u = –(v1 – u), if u = (v1 + v1′). (1.4)
2
In this case, the intuition of an elastic collision implies that the other body should also
experience a mere sign change of its velocity:
v2 ′ – u = –(v2 – u). (1.5)
Consequently, the relative velocity of the two bodies simply changes sign:
v2 ′ – v1′ = –(v2 – v1 ). (1.6)
This is the rule privately enunciated by Newton in 1665 without any apparent
justification.
In order to determine the final velocities v1′ and v2 ′, Huygens needs another relation
between initial and final velocities. He relies on what we would now call the conservation
of kinetic energy, obtained as follows.
By the principle of inertia, the two colliding bodies originally move on a horizontal table
with the constant velocities v1 and v2 . By Galileo’s laws of free fall, these velocities can be
generated by having the two bodies fall from the heights υ1 2 /2g and υ2 2 /2g, respectively, and
then bounce elastically on oblique planes. A subsequent collision between the two bodies
produces the horizontal velocities v1′ and v2 ′, which can then be converted into permanent
elevations by the reverse of the former procedure. Globally, the elevation of the center
of mass of the two bodies has thus been changed reversibly from m1 υ1 2 /4g + m2 υ2 2 /4g to
m1 υ1 ′2 /4g + m2 υ2 ′2 /4g. This process or the inverse process would allow the fabrication of a
perpetual motion, unless we require
m1 υ1 2 + m2 υ2 2 = m1 υ1 ′2 + m2 υ2 ′2 . (1.7)
Huygens combines this relation with the reversal of the relative velocity to determine the
final velocities as a function of the initial velocities. The same combination leads to the
equation
m1 v1 + m2 v2 = m1 v1′ + m1 v2 ′ (1.8)
of momentum conservation, which Huygens has indeed enunciated in a brief communi-

cation of 1669. There is no written evidence that Huygens (also) reached this relation by
applying the conservation of the potential elevation on a boat moving at the velocity u.
Ignaz Schütz gave the first known derivation of this kind in 1897.⁴⁸
⁴⁸ Huygens 1669. On Schütz’s derivation, see pp. 49–50, this volume.

The Cartesian geometer Frans van Schooten discouraged his past student Huygens
from publishing a theory of collisions that contradicted Descartes’s rules. This theory,
completed in the mid-1650s, is found in a manuscript posthumously published in 1703.
Besides Galilean recourse to a nautical thought experiment, Huygens there offers a formal
statement of his relativity principle:
The motion of bodies and their equal and unequal speeds are to be understood in
relation to other bodies considered to be at rest, even if both the former and the latter
bodies happen to be involved in some additional common motion. As a result, when
two bodies collide, even if both are further subject to an additional uniform motion,
they will push each other with respect to a body that is carried by the same common
motion no differently than if this additional motion were absent.
Like Galileo’s, Huygens’s statement concerns the relative motions within a closed system
of bodies and the absence of effect of a common uniform, rectilinear motion on the relative
motions; it is not stated in terms of a change of reference frame or change of “space” as
Newton puts it. That said, what was an empirical generalization for Galileo and a theorem
for Newton, becomes a constructive principle for Huygens. This is a crucial innovation.⁴⁹
Free fall
Even before his first thoughts on collisions, Huygens had a vivid interest in free fall. In 1646,
at age seventeen, he defended the truth of Galileo’s laws in face of Mersenne’s skepticism.
He may already have had the proof of constant acceleration found in a manuscript of 1659
and published in 1673 in his influential Horologium Oscillatorium. In this treatise, he bases
his analysis of free fall on the three following principles:
1) If there were no gravity and if the air did not impede the motion of bodies, any body,
once set into motion, would go on moving with an equal velocity on a straight line.
2) The action of gravity, whatever be its origin, is to make bodies assume a motion
composed of the uniform motion they have in such and such direction and of the
downward motion impressed by gravity.
3) These two motions can be considered independently of each other, and do not
interfere with each other.
In the first principle we recognize the principle of inertia (which Huygens traces to
Descartes’s laws of nature). The second and third principles allow one to determine the
motion of a body falling with an initial velocity from the motion of a body falling from
rest simply by superposing an inertial motion at the initial velocity to the latter motion. As
⁴⁹ Huygens 1703, p. 369. Newton’s “space” very nearly corresponds to our “reference frames.” More on this in
Chapter 2, p. 42 (note 37).
CONCLUSIONS 23
Fig. 1.2. Huygens’ contraption for the horizontal sliding of a body

under constant force. From Huygens [1659], p. 126.
we saw, Galileo introduced this rule in the case in which the initial velocity is horizontal,
and Beeckman and Descartes in the case in which the initial velocity is vertical.⁵⁰
In the manuscript of 1659, Huygens relates this rule to Galilean relativity and he uses it
to derive the laws of free fall. In order to benefit from Galileo’s nautical imagery, he con-
ceives the device of Figure 1.2, in which the body A slides without friction on a horizontal
plane and is pulled with constant force by the descending weight D. Let the body A move
from rest during the time τ and thus acquire the velocity u = v(τ). During the next time
interval of the same duration, it moves under the same force but with the initial velocity u.
Judged from a boat moving at the constant velocity u, the initial velocity of A is still zero
and the acquired velocity should therefore be the same as in the first time interval. Judged
from the shore, the final velocity is the sum of the velocity u of the boat and the velocity
v(τ) acquired during the first interval. Hence we have v(2τ) = 2v(τ), and more generally
v(nτ) = nv(τ) for any integer n and for any time τ. Consequently, v(t) increases linearly
with the time t, the acceleration is a constant, and the space traveled is proportional to the
squared time in conformity with Galileo’s laws.⁵¹
Huygens thus derived the laws of free fall from the principle of relativity. Or he almost
did: he implicitly assumed that the motion of a falling body depended only on its original
position and velocity, and not on any other feature of its anterior motion. Without this
assumption, any law of motion of the form
f = Φ(r̈, ⃛r, ...)r̈ (1.9)
would comply with both the principle of inertia and the principle of relativity. What matters
most, however, is that Huygens regarded the relativity principle as a major constructive
principle both in collisions and in free fall. Since the law of constant acceleration in free
fall can be regarded as a special case of Newton’s second law, some of Huygens’s readers
were tempted to extend his way of reasoning to a proof of the latter law. This happened
repeatedly in the eighteenth century, as we will see in the next chapter.
Conclusions
In this chapter, we walked through the chief mechanical philosophies that subverted the
inherited scholastics in the seventeenth century. We observed the deep interrelatedness of
⁵⁰ Huygens to Mersenne, October 26, 1646, in Huygens 1888–1950, Vol. 1, pp. 24–27; Huygens [1659]; 1673,
p. 21. There is no evidence that Huygens was aware of Beeckman’s and Descartes’s private considerations on free
fall.
⁵¹ Huygens [1659], pp. 125–128. I have somewhat modernized Huygens’s reasoning.
three components of these philosophies: definition of motion, concept of inertia, and rela-
tivity principles or theorems. The different mechanical philosophies may be characterized
by their diverging takes on this conceptual triplet, with consequences for the theory of the
motions naturally occurring in the absence of human intervention.
Motion, inertia, and relativity

Time necessarily enters any definition of motion. Although the concepts of motion varied
considerably from one author to another, there was not much debate on the nature of time.
From antiquity to the early modern period, time was defined so that some distinguished
motions would be uniform (the motion of celestial bodies for the ancients; inertial motion
for Galileo and the neo-atomists). While Newton similarly posited the uniformity of iner-
tial motion, he vaguely and metaphysically characterized time as that which “by its own
nature flows equably,” and more precisely as the temporal parameter with respect to which
his laws of motion hold true. In the modern view, the uniformity of celestial motions could
only be an approximation, and the ancient astronomical definitions of time needed cor-
rection. The definition of motion also implied Euclidean geometry to measure the changes
of location, a point no one believed worth noting. In contrast, there was much variety of
disagreement on the proper definition of the reference of motion.
For Galileo, motion always has a concrete, macroscopic reference; for instance, a ship,
the earth, or the sun and fixed stars. Inertial motion, namely motion persisting without
impressed force (weight or mechanical pressure), is uniform and it is circular or rectilinear.
Mechanical phenomena display the same regularities whether they are referred to the stel-
lar frame, to the earth, or to a uniformly progressing ship. This is partly a consequence of
combining inertial motion with impressed motion and partly an inductive generalization.
For the neo-atomists and for Newton, (true) motion is referred to absolute space, an
imagined immobile and immaterial container of all things. Although logically the ho-
mogeneity and isotropy of space thus conceived should imply rectilinear inertia, most
neo-atomists admit circular inertia to explain the motion of celestial bodies. Newton does
not and instead traces the circular motion of planets to the combined effect of rectilinear
inertia and centripetal gravitational force. His laws of motion imply a relativity theorem ac-
cording to which the relative motions of a system of bodies are the same in absolute space
and in a space in absolute uniform translation. For Copernican neo-atomists, absolute
space is empirically determined as the space in which free bodies have the expected inertial
motion. In Newton’s system, this criterion is not sufficient because his rectilinear inertia
and the resulting relativity theorem make it impossible to discriminate between spaces in
uniform translation with respect to each other. This is why Newton complements his laws
of motion with the hypothesis that the center of mass of the universe is at rest. Nowadays,
we would say that definite laws of motion require only a definite space–time structure and
we would find this structure in the equivalence class of inertial frames. This is not an op-
tion for Newton: in his mind definite laws of motion require a concept of absolute motion.
He indeed makes the determination of this absolute or true motion the chief aim of the
Principia:⁵²
⁵² Newton 1687, p. 11; 1729, Vol. 1, p. 18.

CONCLUSIONS 25
How we are to collect the true motions from their causes, effects, and apparent dif-
ferences; and vice versa, how from the motions, either true or apparent, we may come
to the knowledge of their causes and effects, shall be explain’d more at large in the
following Tract. For to this end it was that I compos’d it.
For Descartes, the true motion of a body is motion with respect to adjacent bodies in
a plenum. His concept of inertia is peculiar, for it is defined as the persistence of rest or
motion in this local sense. It implies, together with the associated collision rules, that the
relative motions within a portion of the universe are not affected by any global motion of
this portion even if this motion departs from uniformity or rectilinearity. At the same time,
Descartes assumes that a corpuscle rotating around the sun within a vortex tends at every
instant to take the tangent even though the corpuscle does not have any true motion. This
inconsistency results from misleading analogy with a stone rotating in a catapult through a
stationary medium (and thus truly moving). At any rate, no major disciple of Descartes fol-
lowed him in his peculiar definition of true motion and inertia. What seduced his followers
was the general endeavor to reduce all physics to matter and motion, without mysterious
action at a distance or immanent forces.
Huygens, being some sort of Cartesian, agrees with Descartes that actions should be
mechanically mediated and he requires motion to be referred to material bodies. Being
more concerned than Descartes with the mechanics of macroscopic bodies, he wants this
reference to be concretely realizable (Descartes’s subtle medium cannot serve for this pur-
pose) and he wants it to be compatible with simple laws of motion at our scale. In practice
he picks the earth, a moving boat, or the sun and fixed stars, just as Galileo has done before
him. In Chapter 3 we will see how, late in his life, he theoretically constructed the inertial
frames by means of free particles mutually at rest.
Natural motions
These diverse concepts of motion, inertia, and relativity imply diverse approaches to free
fall and celestial motion. Galileo treats planetary motion as a case of circular inertia
(around the sun) and free fall as a combination of inertial motion and uniformly accel-
erated vertical motion. In the latter case, the inertial motion can be circular (around the
earth) or rectilinear (with respect to sun and fixed stars) according to the problem treated;
the accelerated vertical motion results from a tendency of masses to come together; and
this tendency and inertia are both regarded as natural. In addition, Galileo speculates that
the circular velocity of the planets may have resulted from their fall from a common large
height (measured from the sun). This is universal gravitation avant la lettre. As any of
his contemporaries, Galileo measures quantity of matter through weight, even when this
quantity enters the definition of impetus as the product of velocity and quantity of matter.
Weight thus being the only parameter of free fall, all bodies have to fall at the same speed
irrespective of their size and density as long as the resistance of the medium can be ignored.
For Descartes, the circular motion of planets results from their being dragged by a vortex
centered on the sun. Similarly, the rotation of the earth is caused by a surrounding sub-
vortex. The rotation of the subtle matter in the propelling vortex being faster than the
rotation of the planet, the centrifugal force density on a body near the planet’s surface is
smaller than the centrifugal force density on the surrounding subtle matter. This is how
Descartes explains weight. According to this view, the active role of the medium makes it
plausible that the acceleration of a free-falling body would depend on its weight and on its
initial velocity, against Galileo’s laws.
In contrast, for Beeckman and for the young Descartes free fall is to be understood as
the superposition, at every instant, of inertial motion at the acquired velocity and acceler-
ation independent of this acquired velocity. This mechanism implies the constancy of the
acceleration, in conformity with Galileo’s empirical laws. In essence, Newton assumes the
same mechanism, since his second law makes the momentum increase at a given time of
the fall independent of the acquired momentum. Evidently, this mechanism implies that
the law of constant vertical acceleration in free fall remains true on Galileo’s moving ship.
In Huygens’s eyes, Galilean relativity is more basic than Newton’s second law, and it is
the deeper reason why the acceleration of a falling body does not depend on its previously
acquired motion.
Whereas Beeckman imagines gravity to be caused by atomic impacts and Descartes
traces it to ethereal vortices, Galileo and Newton refrain from any specific mechanism. In-
stead they both assume some mutual attraction of the particles of matter, and they both
assume a relationship between free fall and planetary motion. What permitted Newton’s
final breakthrough was his belief in rectilinear inertia, which demands an active force to
keep the planets on their curved trajectory, together with Hooke’s assumption that this
force is proportional to the inverse squared distance from the sun. Newton henceforth as-
sumed the universal attraction we would now write as Gmm′/r2 between two point-masses
m and m′ separated by the distance r.
Galileo’s observations, his and Newton’s experiments with pendulums, and his inter-
pretation of celestial motions require the mass m occurring in this formula to be the same
as the inertial mass in Newton’s second law. Newton argues for this identity in the third
book of the Principia, thereby indicating that it agrees with the assumption that all matter
is made of particles of the same homogeneous substance dispersed in a vacuum. Indeed,
under this assumption the inertial mass and the gravitational mass of a body are both
proportional to the total volume of the primitive substance. As Newton and his followers
usually assumed this much in their atomistic speculations, the mass independence of mo-
tion under gravity was natural to them. More puzzling in their eyes was the existence of
forces, such as magnetic forces, for which this independence does not hold.⁵³
The existence of “accelerating forces,” such as gravity, under which the motion of a body
does not depend on its mass, has a singular consequence that did not escape Newton’s
attention. In a portion of space in which the accelerating field is homogeneous, all bodies
of a system are subjected to the same acceleration. Therefore, as Newton puts it, the relative
motion of these bodies under additional forces is the same as if the accelerating field did
not exist. As Albert Einstein would later put it, the effects of a homogeneous gravitational
field can be eliminated by referring the motions to a frame moving with the acceleration
induced by this field. This relativity theorem was important to Newton, for it enabled him
to ignore the gravitational effect of a distant body when analyzing the motion of a binary
⁵³ Newton 1687, pp. 408–411; 1713, p. 368 (Corollaries 3–4); 1729, Vol. 2, pp. 224–225.
CONCLUSIONS 27
system. For instance, the attraction of the sun does not affect the relative motion of the
moon and the earth.
Altogether, the mechanics of Galileo, Huygens, and Newton produced two kinds of
relativity: one concerning Galilean frames, the other concerning rectilinearly accelerated
frames. As we will see in the next chapter, both played a role in the later history of
mechanics, not only as theorems but also as principles.
2
DERIVING NEWTON’S SECOND LAW FROM RELATIVITY
PRINCIPLES
The principle of relative motions leads, with as much rigor as ease, to the theorem
of the proportionality of forces to the accelerations they produce on the same
body, and to the theorem for the composition of force.¹ (Jean-Baptiste Bélanger,
1847)
In the previous chapter, we saw that Huygens used the Galilean relativity principle to derive
several laws of mechanics for collisions and free fall. He did not attempt a derivation of
Newton’s second law beyond the limited case of constant force. As for Newton, he regarded
his laws of motion as inductively drawn from the observed behavior of falling, colliding,
and gravitating bodies. We will now see that in the two following centuries, there were
numerous attempts to justify the law of acceleration through relativity principles. We will
also see that the motivations for such reasoning varied. The relativity-based deductions
could be, in the eighteenth century, part of an endeavor to give mechanics a purely rational
foundation. Or, after Laplace’s pivotal intervention, they were usually meant to simplify
the basis of mechanics, without denying its empirical origins. In both cases, the deductions
had a similar structure, and much of their appeal depended on the constructive power of
the relativity principles.
My plural in “relativity principles” alludes to an interesting aspect of this story: it in-
volves not only the Galilean relativity principle more or less as we know it, but also an
accelerative relativity principle according to which a rectilinear motion, uniform or not,
commonly impressed on a system of bodies, does not affect the relative motions of these
bodies under given forces. We saw in Chapter 1 that Newton derived this accelerative rela-
tivity from his laws of motion. We will now see that Jean-Baptiste Bélanger and a number
of French authors after him turned this law into a constructive principle from which the
law of acceleration could be derived. We will also see that the term “relativity principle”
can be traced to Bélanger’s “principle of relative motions.”
Sections 2.1 and 2.2 of this chapter follow the historical intricacies of eighteenth-
century and nineteenth-century derivations of the second law. A more synthetic, less
chronological, and more easily readable account is given in Section 2.3. The conclu-
sion contains ahistorical remarks on the respectability of these derivations, as well as
an assessment of their historical importance in a suggested new approach to theory
construction.
¹ Bélanger 1847, p. III.
Relativity Principles and Theories from Galileo to Einstein. Olivier Darrigol, Oxford University Press.
© Olivier Darrigol (2022). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849533.003.0002
RATIONAL MECHANICS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 29
2.1 Rational mechanics in the eighteenth century

Newton’s mechanics and his theory of gravitation gradually diffused through Europe
at the turn of the eighteenth century. British and Dutch Newtonians remained close
to the spirit and style of Newton’s Principia: they reasoned geometrically and induc-
tively, they accepted absolute space and time, and they maintained Newton’s statement
of the laws of motion. The only exception worth mentioning is the third edition of
Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande’s widely read Physices elementa mathematica, which offered
the following justification of Newton’s second law for impulsively generated change of
momentum:
We derive this law from the phenomena: indeed, in a ship an impelled body under-
goes the same motion whether the ship rests or moves forward uniformly with some
velocity. This proves that two motions do not interfere with each other, as is also true
for a larger number of motions.
The remark seems reminiscent of Huygens’s derivation of the laws of free fall, except that
Newton’s impulses now replace the continuous action imagined by Huygens. It represents,
in a sketchy form, a first derivation of Newton’s second law based on a relativity principle.²
Newtonian mechanics took its modern mathematical form in the hands of a few Swiss
and French Newtonians in the first third of the eighteenth century. Leonhard Euler, Jean
le Rond d’Alembert, and Joseph Lagrange later extended it to continua and connected sys-
tems. Mixed mathematics gradually absorbed all physics, under a mechanical umbrella. At
the close of the century, Pierre Simon de Laplace’s ambition was to reduce all physics to
Newtonian interactions between point-like atoms. This century-long transformation nat-
urally included reflections on the foundations of mechanics. The new builders, especially
Euler, d’Alembert, and Laplace, wanted to consolidate the basic laws of mechanics. Euler
and d’Alembert argued for their rational necessity; Laplace their empirical necessity. They
all employed Galilean relativity in this endeavor.
Euler’s Mechanica
Galileo and Newton asserted the empirical origin of the fundamental laws of physics, and
they denounced Aristotle’s and Descartes’s belief in the rational necessity of these laws. As
a nondogmatic Cartesian, Huygens wanted to derive the most important laws from com-
monly acceptable principles (inertia, relativity, impossibility of perpetual motion), without
committing himself on the rational or empirical origin of these principles. In contrast, the
two most influential geometers of the eighteenth century, Euler and d’Alembert, firmly
asserted the purely rational character of the laws of mechanics.
In his Mechanica of 1736, Euler follows Newton in defining absolute motion as change
of place in the unlimited space of the entire world. He derives the law of inertia from the
principle of sufficient reason: a particle at rest in the infinite empty space remains at rest
because it has no more reason to move in one direction than in any other direction; if
² ′s Gravesande 1742, p. 94. The earlier editions (from 1720 on) did not contain this remark.
30 DERIVING NEWTON’S SECOND LAW FROM RELATIVITY PRINCIPLES
the particle is originally moving, its velocity has no more reason to decrease than it has
to increase, and its path has no more reason to deviate one way than any other. Whereas
for Newton inertia served to define absolute space, for Euler absolute space implies iner-
tia. Euler further believes inertia to require “a true, essential cause in the body,” echoing
Newton’s vis insita.³
Euler’s reasoning sounds incorrect because one could very well admit that the velocity
v of a particle in empty space varies like v = v0 e–t/τ without contradicting the homogeneity
and isotropy of space. It could be saved by appealing to the isotropy of time. Or one could
use Galilean relativity to derive the permanence of motion from the permanence of rest.
Instead Euler notes that the law of inertia remains valid for motion in a relative space
moving uniformly and rectilinearly with respect to the absolute space. When observing a
free particle, Euler comments, there are no means to determine how much of its motion
is absolute and how much is relative. Unlike Newton, Euler does not try to remove this
underdetermination by requiring the center of mass of the universe to be at rest.⁴
For Newton and Euler, a force is what causes departure from inertial motion. More
specifically, Euler defines an “absolute force” (potentia absoluta) as a continuous force
whose action on a material point (body) does not depend on the motion of this point. Like
Huygens, he means that for a given value of the absolute force f, the motion of a body
initially moving at the velocity u can be obtained by composing the motion of a body ini-
tially at rest with a uniform motion at the velocity u. Considering the motion r(t) in a time
τ so small that the variation of the force f is negligible and slightly modernizing Euler’s
reasoning, this implies
ṙ(t + τ) = ṙ(t) + Φ[f(t)]τ, or r̈ = Φ(f). (2.1)
That is to say, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the force f and the acceleration
r̈ of the body at any instant. Euler thus generalizes Huygens’s deduction of the laws of
free fall from Galilean relativity. He then determines the correspondence Φ in two steps.
First, he argues that the force on a body must be proportional to its mass, or number of
points, because a mass M subjected to the force F can be replaced by n masses M/n each
subjected to the force F/n. Second, through a peculiar thought experiment he argues that
the parallelogram of forces implies the proportionality of force and acceleration.⁵
Unfortunately, this thought experiment implicitly assumes the nonevident fact that the
motion of the center of mass of two particles subjected to the forces f1 and f2 is the same
as if this center were a single particle subjected to the resultant f1 + f2 . This flaw probably
explains why later authors ignored Euler’s deduction of the law f = mr̈. Still, they may have
been seduced by his reliance on Galilean relativity in the first part of his proof.⁶
There is an important difference between Euler’s and Newton’s concepts of force. Like
Huygens, Euler treats force as continuous, and he measures it statically, through balances.
³ Euler 1736, Section 1–8 (motion and space), Section 56–76 (inertia). Cf. Jammer 1957, pp. 215–217; Pulte 1989,
pp. 108, 115; Maltese 2000, pp. 321–322.
⁴ Euler 1736, Section 77–82.
⁵ Euler 1736, Section 99 (force), 111 (absolute), 118–135 (r̈ = Φ(f)), 136 (f ∝ m), 146 (f ∝ r̈).
⁶ Cf. Darrigol 2014a, pp. 26–27.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
most natural for us to do, but each hand on its corresponding
shoulder, and if they feel very cold, they bring their elbows together
in front and shrink their heads into their shoulders, so that the ears
touch the sides of the hands.
They are fond of gambling, particularly the inhabitants of Loanda,
and also the slaves and servants of the white men on the coast. For
this they use playing-cards, and also small round pieces of crockery
ground on a stone to the size of a sixpence, and these they shake in
the hands and throw up in the same way as a handful of halfpence in
our game of “toss,” and according as a greater or lesser number of
the plain or coloured sides come down uppermost, so do the players
win or lose. I have also seen in several places a board in which were
a number of shallow pits, and in these a few seeds or round pebbles,
which were rapidly shifted about into the different holes by the two
players, but I could never make out the plan of the game. Beyond
this, and the “batuco” or dance, and playing the “marimba,” the
natives of Angola have absolutely no game or amusement of any
kind whatever.
The youngsters have no toys or playthings, and never race or play
together as ours do.
None, either young or old, know or practise a single game of skill
or strength; there is not an indication anywhere that they ever
contended at ball, stick, wrestling, or any other exercise or feat. This
to my mind is striking in the highest degree, and most suggestive of
a singularly low type, one in which no sentiment of emulation or
rivalry exists, and consequently very difficult to work upon with much
chance of success for its advancement.
I have never seen or heard of any monument, or sculptured rocks
or stones being found in the country, which might indicate the
existence of a previous race; and the most curious thing is that even
tradition of any kind is unknown to the blacks of Angola. In no case
could they trace events further back than during the reign of five
“sobas;” no very great length of time when it is considered that these
are generally old men when elected. They do not even know the
history of the crucifixes now-existing amongst them as “fetishes” of
the “sobas;” and when I have explained to them that they formerly
belonged to the missionaries, they were astonished, and gave as a
reason for their ignorance and my knowledge, that the white men
could write, whereas, when they died, nothing they had seen or
known was preserved, as our writings were, for the information of
their children.
This again, I think, is very indicative of their low type; as also is the
fact that no animal is tamed or utilized by the negro, or made
subservient to his comfort in any way. Even the cows or goats are
not milked except by the natives south of the River Quanza. In no
part of Angola (and the same holds good, I believe, of the whole
negro race) is a single animal employed in agriculture as a beast of
burden, or for riding.
The burial places of the blacks of Angola are almost everywhere
alike. A square place is raised about a foot from the ground, and the
earth enclosed by short stakes or flat pieces of rock, and on this
raised space broken bottles and crockery of every description are
placed.
The ordinary burial places, like those mentioned about Ambriz, are
merely mounds of earth or stones, with a stick to mark the grave of a
man, and a basket that of a woman; and sometimes a slab of rock is
stuck upright in the ground to indicate the head of the grave.
Occasionally, in the case of a big “soba,” there are several tiers of
earth raised one above the other, and ornamented with broken glass
and crockery and various figures representing “fetishes,” and I have
also seen a shade of sticks and grass erected over the whole, to
keep it from the rain.
Plate XVI.
Pelopœus spirifex and nest.—Devil of the Road.—Dasylus sp.—
Caterpillars’ nests.—Mantis and nest.—Manis multiscutatum
and Ants’ nests.
To face page 277.
The “Salalé” or “white ant,” as the larva of quite a small black ant
is called, is, from its numbers and the ravages it commits, a very
important insect, and merits some notice. It is most abundant in the
interior, where the soil, from the decomposition of the clay and mica
slate, is more earthy or clayey, as it is not fond of rocky, stony, or
sandy ground unless it is very ferruginous. Their nests are
sometimes large, pointed masses of earth three and four feet high,
and as many in diameter at the base, internally tunnelled in every
direction, and swarming with ants, eggs, and larvæ; but the usual
nests are about a foot or eighteen inches high, like a gigantic
mushroom, with from one to six round curved heads placed one on
top of the other (Plate XVI.). These nests are very hard, and the
exceedingly fine earth or clay of which they are made must be mixed
with some gummy secretion, by means of which it becomes so hard
on drying.
My cook at Cambambe was very clever at making small dome-
shaped ovens from old ants’ nests, which he ground fine and mixed
to a thick paste or mortar. When the oven was dry (nothing else
being used in building it but this mortar), he lit a fire in it, and it burnt
to almost the hardness of stone, and without a crack or flaw in it; it
was then ready for use, and lasted a long time. These ovens were
big enough to bake three small loaves of bread at a time.
These nests are sometimes so numerous, particularly in the
grassy plains of the interior, as to render walking difficult in many
places, and, when the grass has been burnt off, they give a very
peculiar appearance to the surface, looking something like a field of
brown cauliflowers. They are, like the larger ones, perforated with
galleries in every direction, and also full of ants and larvæ. It is
curious that considering the existence of the countless millions of
these ants over large areas of country, no bird, and with the
exception of the rare Manis multiscutata, no animal, should be found
to feed on them. This animal is something like an armadillo, with a
long tail, and covered with large, hard, long scales (Plate XVI.).
Specimens are sold at Loanda and elsewhere, and used as
“fetishes” by the natives. A species of the “ant-bear,” apparently the
same as that found at the Cape, is not uncommon in Benguella, but I
have seen its burrows in situations near the sea, in salt, dusty plains,
&c., where very little or no “Salalé” is found, and from examination of
the dung, I found that its food must consist principally of small lizards
and larvæ of insects, and beetles, especially the Psammodes
oblonga, Dej., so extremely abundant in its haunts.
The natives of Benguella say there are two kinds, one very much
larger than the other. I once tasted a roasted leg of the ant-bear,
called “Jimbo” by the natives, and its flavour was very much like
pork.
It is a well-known fact that the white ant is most destructive to
timber and woodwork of every description, as well as to all clothes
and fabrics. Nothing comes amiss to its insatiable jaws, with the
exception of metal and some very few woods. Goods, provisions,
&c., must be kept on tables or frames built on wooden legs, as if
placed on the ground they would quickly be destroyed; but even then
care must be taken to examine the legs or supports of the frames
every day, as they will run up these in search of the good things on
the top. The white ant is about a quarter of an inch long, and its body
is very soft and white, but with a black head provided with most
powerful jaws for so small a creature.
It never ventures into the light, and when it leaves the shelter of
the ground always protects itself by building a flattened tube of earth
or sand as it goes along; it will carry this tube up a wall to reach a
window-sill or other woodwork, or right up to the roof timbers. Any
object left for a little time on the ground, particularly in a closed or
dark store, is quickly covered over with earth, and then completely
eaten away. I have known a pair of shoes thus covered in one night,
and the thread, being the softest part, devoured, so that the leathers
came apart at the seams when they were lifted.
I once left a trunk full of clothes at Loanda whilst I was away for
about a month on an excursion inland. When I returned the trunk
seemed all right, but on opening it I found that a black cloth coat I
had laid at the top was at the bottom, and under it about a couple of
handfuls of dust was all that remained of my boxfull of clothes.
Window or door frames I have seen completely eaten away from
the walls, leaving only a thin covering, often not thicker than a sheet
of brown paper, or little more than the thickness of the paint.
Whilst lying awake one night, I noticed a peculiar thrumming noise
made by the white ant when manufacturing a tube up the wall near
my bedside. In the morning I carefully peeled off the top of the tube
with a penknife, just sufficiently to observe the motions of the little
masons within, and I saw a string of larvæ coming up loaded with
little pellets of clay, which they delivered to others at the top, who
simultaneously, and at intervals of four or five seconds, patted them
down, thus producing the noise I had heard. This noise can be very
plainly heard if the larvæ are working on the “loandos” or mats with
which the huts or stick-houses are covered.
Towards the end of the rainy season the white ant attains its
perfect form, and on a still, warm evening, generally after a shower
of rain, a wonderful sight presents itself when the perfect winged
insects issue forth in countless myriads from the ground. This is
everywhere full of little holes, about the size of a goose-quill, from
which the ants are forcing their way out, not singly, but in a solid
compact body or stream. They instantly take wing and rise upwards
for about six to twelve feet, when the breeze wafts them about in
every direction. The air becomes so full of these ants, that a mist
seems to hang over the ground, and I have seen the whole of the
bottom of the valley at Bembe completely enshrouded by them.
Great is the feast of birds and animals at this time. Birds of all kinds
are attracted by the sight and collect in numbers, flying low, and
gorging themselves with them. I have shot hawks and eagles with
their crops full to their beaks. Poultry eat them till they go about with
their beaks open, unable to find room for any more. Several tame
monkeys I had at Bembe used to sit on the ground, and, taking
pinches of the ants as they issued from their holes, bite off the
succulent bodies and throw away the wings.
On our last journey to Bembe my wife was very much amused to
see two little children come out of a hut, each with a slice of
“quiquanga,” and, sitting down on the ground close by an ant-hole,
proceed to take pinches of the ants (exactly as I have described the
monkeys as doing), and eat them as a relish to their “quiquanga.”
After rising in the air for a very little while, the ants quickly fall, lose
their wings, and disappear in the ground, leaving it covered with the
pretty, delicate, transparent wings. These lie so thickly that a handful
can easily be collected together. This will give some idea of the
number of these destructive pests, which Nature seems to provide
with wings simply to enable them to spread about and form new
colonies. It is very fortunate that they do not attack live plants or
roots. These soft, delicate little mites doubtless play an important
part in Nature’s most wonderful plan for the balance of life by quickly
destroying all dead timber and other vegetable matter that the quick
growing and ever luxuriant vegetation would otherwise soon
completely cover, thereby choking up the surface of the country.
These ants do not wait for the fall of a dead tree, or even a branch,
for they will find the latter out, and carrying their earthen tube up the
tree quickly consume the rotten limb. I do not know how intelligence
of a likely morsel is conveyed to the larvæ underground, but it is
most likely carried by the ants. They will construct four or five feet of
tube up a wall in one night, straight to a coat or any other object that
may be hanging up; they will also come through a wall, in which they
have bored, exactly behind anything placed against it that may be
likely food for their jaws.
There are many other species of ants in Angola; one very large
black kind migrates in columns of perhaps eight to ten abreast, and
as much as ten or twelve yards in length; they walk very fast, and do
not deviate from their intended path unless compelled to do so by an
impassable obstacle.
On touching one of these columns with a stick, a curious fizzing
noise is produced, which is communicated to the whole body, and
they instantly open out in all directions in search of the supposed
enemy; after a great deal of running backwards and forwards with
their powerful hooked mandibles open and upraised, they again
collect and fall into a column and proceed on their way.
I remember a laughable incident that happened at a small town on
the road to Bembe, where I once put up for the night. Some of my
carriers had gone to sleep in a hut, and towards morning I was
awakened by screams and shouts, and saw a number of these
blacks coming pell-mell out of it, dancing, jumping, and running
about like mad. All the town was alarmed, and the natives came
running out of their huts to ascertain what was the matter. I had
hardly got on my feet when the cries were mixed with peals of
laughter, they having quickly found out the cause of the terrific
uproar.
It was nothing else than a column of these ants that had passed
through the hut and had instantly fastened on the bodies of the
sleeping blacks with which it was filled. They fasten their great jaws
into the skin so tightly, that their bodies can be pulled off their heads
without relaxing their hold. The mandibles must discharge a
poisonous fluid into the wound, as their bite feels exactly like a sharp
puncture from a red-hot needle, and they always draw blood.
I once unconsciously put my foot upon a column, but luckily only
three or four fastened on my ankle and leg, and I shall never forget
the sudden and sharp hot bite of the wretches.
There is another kind very abundant on bushes and trees, of a
semi-transparent watery-red colour, with long legs; their bite is also
very sharp. They build nests by attaching the leaves together with
fine white web; these nests are from the size of an apple to that of a
hat.
Their food must be principally the fruit and seeds of the plants they
are usually found on. Some seeds, particularly those of the india-
rubber creeper, I had the greatest difficulty in obtaining ripe, from
these ants eating them up whilst green.
A minute red ant, like that which infests our kitchens and houses,
is extremely abundant, and is very difficult to keep out of sugar and
other provisions; the best way is to place the legs of the table in
saucers of vinegar and water, or have safes suspended by a rope,
which must be tarred, or they will find their way down. If anything on
which they are swarming is placed in the sun, they immediately
vanish. A small piece of camphor, tied up in a bit of rag and placed in
a sugar-basin or safe, will effectually keep them out, without
flavouring the sugar, &c., in the least.
The best and cheapest preventive against the white ant is ordinary
petroleum; they will not come near a place where the least trace of
its smell exists.
Of other insects the most abundant and worthy of note, besides
the mosquitoes already described, are the many species of wasps.
One of these, brightly barred with yellow and having a comical habit
of dropping down its long legs in a bunch straight under its body as it
flies, is the Pelopœus spirifex (Plate XVI.)—(called “marimbondo” by
the natives)—and is one of the large family found in the tropics and
called “mud-daubers” from their habit of making clay or mud nests in
which they store up spiders and caterpillars as provision for the
grubs or larvæ. It is a very singular fact that of the fifty or sixty
species known to entomologists, all are males, the females not
having yet been discovered. It is supposed that the latter are
parasites on other insects, or perhaps in ants’ nests, &c. I have
opened many hundreds of the clay cells and invariably found a grub
or perfect male insect, or the empty chrysalis of one; and I further
ascertained that the male insect does not bring the female in its legs
or mouth to lay the egg in the cell, nor does he bring the egg, but the
young, hatched grub. I watched one nest being built, and when it
was ready, I saw the insect fly away and return and go into it, and on
examination I found that it had deposited the small grub at the
bottom. In its next journeys it brought spiders till the cell was full of
them, when it procured some clay and quickly plastered over the
aperture. To procure the spiders it first stabs them with its dreadful
sting, and then picks them up and flies away with them to its nest.
Whilst at Bembe, I fortunately witnessed a fight between a large
specimen of these wasps and a powerful spider which had built its
fine web on my office wall. The spider nearly had the wasp
enveloped in its web several times, and by means of its long legs
prevented the wasp from reaching its body with its sting, but at last,
after a few minutes hard fighting, the wasp managed to stab the
spider right in the abdomen, when it instantly curled up its legs and
dropped like dead to the ground. The wasp pounced down on it, but I
interfered, and picking up the spider placed it under a tumbler to
ascertain how long it would live, as I had noticed that the spiders
stored in the nests were always alive, although unable to crawl away
when taken out. It lived for a week, and, although moving its legs
when touched, had no power of locomotion, showing that the poison
of the wasp has a strong paralysing effect. I have counted as many
as twenty spiders in a single cell, and there are seldom less than
three cells together, and sometimes as many as eight or ten.
These wasps are fond of building their nests in the houses, on
curtains, behind picture-frames, books, or furniture, and I once found
the inside of a harmonium full of them. Each cell is about the size of
a thimble; they are very smoothly and prettily made, and a wasp will
build one in a day easily. I never found anything else in these cells
but spiders and caterpillars.
It is satisfactory to know that these savage destroyers of spiders
have in their turn enemies from which they have no escape. These
are large, long-bodied, brown flies (Dasylus sp. and Dasypogon sp.)
(Plate XVI.), with long legs and a very quiet inoffensive look and
manner of flying. They settle on the backs of the different species of
wasps, their long legs enabling them to keep at such a distance that
the wasp cannot reach them with its sting, then insert a long sharp
proboscis into the wasp’s back and suck its body dry, when they fly
off in search of another. Other beautiful flies of splendent metallic
colouring (Stilbum sp.) also prey on the wasps and mud-daubers.
These flies again are an easy prey to the numerous insectivorous
birds, and thus we get a series of links of the complicated chain of
the apparently somewhat cruel law of Nature, by means of which the
due proportion of animal life would appear to be principally adjusted,
and an undue preponderance of one kind over another prevented.
On the stems of the high grass may very often be seen little round
nests about the size of a hen’s egg, having the appearance of rough
glazed paper, and made by the different species of Mantis (Plate
XVI.). These nests are applied by the black women to an odd use;
they rub the soles of their children’s feet with them in the belief that it
will make them good walkers when they grow up, and I have often
seen the little brats struggling and yelling in their mothers’ laps whilst
being thus tickled.
A large species of wasp (Synagris cornuta) is called the “devil of
the road” by the natives, from the alleged poisonous character of its
bite and sting. It is a ferocious-looking creature with very large and
powerful mandibles (Plate XVI.). It is an inch and a half long, and is
said to have a habit of settling on the paths: hence its name, and the
natives then always give it a wide berth.
The sting of this class of insect is poisonous. One very small
species once stung me in the back of the neck, and it was greatly
swollen, for several hours; and I have seen a black who had been
stung in the ear by a moderate sized one, with not only his ear but
the side of his face very much swollen for a couple of days.
Centipedes are very abundant, but their bite is not dangerous. I
was bitten by one in the shoulder whilst asleep, and on awaking, and
putting my hand instinctively to the place, I was bitten a second time
in the wrist, and, although it was a large specimen, beyond the sharp
puncture and considerable irritation near the spots, no other ill effect
was produced. Whilst I was at Bembe a Portuguese officer was
bitten between the fingers, and his hand and arm as far as the
shoulder were swollen slightly for two or three days, but without
much pain.
Many of the caterpillars are very gorgeously coloured and
fancifully ornamented with tufts of hair, but generally the moths and
butterflies are of a more dull and sombre colouring than might be
expected from the tropical latitude of Angola. Insect life as a rule is
scarce, with the exception of ants and mosquitoes, and not only very
local in its occurrence but also confined to a short space of time.
Hardly an insect of any kind is to be seen in the “cacimbo,” and in
the hot season the different species of butterflies only appear for a
very few weeks, and sometimes only days. Beetles are remarkably
scarce at any time. The finest butterflies are, of course, found in the
forest region of the first and second elevation, and almost exclusively
in the places most deeply shaded, where they flit about near the
ground between the trees. The sunny open places full of flowering
plants are not so much frequented by butterflies as might be
expected, but the great abundance of insectivorous birds may
possibly supply an explanation of this circumstance.
The following interesting note on the butterflies of Angola has
been kindly written by my friend, Mr. W. C. Hewitson, so well known
from his magnificent collection, and his beautiful work on ‘Exotic
Butterflies’:—
“Until very recently we knew nothing of the butterflies of Angola,
and very little of those of Africa north of the Cape of Good Hope,
except what we could learn from the plates of Drury. The great
genus Romaleosoma, so peculiar to that country, and remarkable for
its rich colour, rivalling even Agrias of America, was only represented
in the British Museum. Now we have them in abundance, and
several species are plentiful in Angola.
“We have had large collections from that country during the last
two years from Mr. Rogers, a collector sent out by me, and from Mr.
Monteiro, who, with the assistance of his wife, caught and brought
home a fine collection of Lepidoptera.
“With the first collections of Mr. Rogers, made on the banks of the
River Quanza, I was greatly disappointed. With a very few
exceptions they contained those butterflies only which we had
previously received in abundance from the Cape and from Natal. A
collection from the mountainous district of Casengo was much more
promising, and supplied us, together with some new species, with
several varieties little known before, amongst them Charaxes
Anticlea and Harma Westermanni.
“Mr. Monteiro’s collection, though also deficient in new species,
contained several of great value, and only recently discovered—
Godartia Trajanus, so remarkable for its nearly circular wings, which
had been previously taken by Mr. Crossley on the Cameroons; the
rare Charaxes Lysianassa, figured by Professor Westwood in his
‘Thesaurus;’ Charaxes Bohemani, which we had previously received
from the Zambesi; the very beautiful Crenis Benguella, described by
Mr. Chapman; and a number of varieties of Acræa Euryta, and the
Diademas, which so closely resemble them.
“The most remarkable new species in the collection was the large
Euryphene Plistonax, since figured in the ‘Exotic Butterflies.’
“It is interesting to learn that the same species of butterflies are in
Africa spread over a very large extent of country. The distance from
the Cape of Good Hope to Angola is 1400 miles. Several new
species which I have had from the West Coast have been received
by Mr. Ward from Zanzibar, a distance of 36 degrees. Two new
species of Papilio, remarkable because unlike anything previously
seen from Africa, which I had received from Bonny, were very soon
afterwards sent to Mr. Ward from Zanzibar.”
Mr. H. Druce has published a list of the butterflies we collected in
the ‘Proceedings of the Zoological Society’ for 1875.
Several caterpillars form very curious nests or houses to protect
their bodies. One is made of bits of twig about an inch and a half
long, attached round a strong cocoon or web (Plate XVI.); the head
and front legs alone are protruded at will, which enables the insect to
walk about on the under side of the leaves on which it feeds. Another
is built up on the same plan, but the bits of twig are short and laid
across the length of the cocoon, and the whole enveloped in a strong
white web (Plate XVI.).
The coast of Angola has never to my knowledge been dredged for
shells. The surf grinds and destroys any that may be thrown up on
the beach, but as this is almost everywhere sandy and very slightly
shelving from the land, dredging would probably prove its fauna to
be rich. Land and fresh-water shells are rare.
I have seen land tortoises at Benguella and Musserra only, and
they appear to be confined to the gneiss and granite rocks of those
two places. They are only found in the hot season, and according to
the natives they hybernate in holes in the rock during the “cacimbo.”
The natives eat them, so that it is not easy to obtain live specimens.
Two that I brought home from Musserra lived for some time at the
gardens of the Zoological Society, and were described by Dr. Selater
as the Cinixys erosa and the Cinixys belliana (Proc. Zool. Soc.
1871).
Porcupines are not uncommon, and I often found their quills lying
on the ground. The natives are fond of the flesh of this pretty animal;
they are also fond of sticking the quills in the wool of their heads as
an ornament, but they have no acquaintance with the story of their
being able to project their quills when angry, or as a means of
defence.
Fruits are by no means so abundant in Angola as they might be. It
is only within the last few years that the Portuguese have followed
the good example of the old missionaries in planting fruit-trees. Most
of the European fruit-trees grow remarkably well. Oranges are of
delicious quality. Mulberries bear most abundantly, but only a very
few trees are to be seen. Limes grow wild in many places. Mangoes
(Mangifera Indica) grow splendidly, but are scarce everywhere
except about the Bengo country; there are none on the Quanza, the
natives having a prejudice against planting the tree, as they believe it
would be unlucky. Sweet and sour Sop (Anona sp.) and Papaw
(Carica Papaya) are very common. The Guava (Psidium Guaiava)
grows wild in abundance in many places, and the Araçá, another
species (P. Araçá) is also cultivated. The Jambo (Jambosa vulgaris)
is found growing wild, and, although rather insipid, it has a delicious
scent of attar of roses. The “Munguengue” is the name of a tree (a
species of Spondiaceæ) bearing bunches of yellow, plum-like fruit of
a very delicious flavour and scent, and its pulp mixed with water and
sugar makes one of the nicest drinks I have tasted. It is a very
handsome tree with leaves of a bright, spring green, of which goats,
sheep, and other animals are exceedingly fond. The wood is soft and
useless for carpentry, but the branches are much used for fences
round huts and enclosures, as any piece stuck in the ground quickly
takes root, and soon grows into a fine shady tree. The natives on the
coast eat the fruit of the Chrysobolamus Icaca, var., which they call
“Jingimo”; it is like a round, black-purple plum, tasteless and
astringent. It is a common sea-side plant, covering large stretches of
coast, and growing from large trailing masses a few inches high, to
small bushy trees. It has a round, bright, shiny, green leaf.
Pineapples are generally very fine, and might be grown to any
extent. Grapes and figs are sparingly grown, but bear well.
The only plants employed by the natives as scents are the seeds
of the Hibiscus Abelmoschus, smelling strongly of musk, and a very
sweet-smelling wood. These they keep in their boxes with their
cloths, &c., and also rub them over the head and body. The natives
from the interior also rub themselves over with a stinking nut
something like an acorn, with a powerful smell like rotten onions.
These are brought to the coast for sale to the natives of Ambriz. On
my asking one of them how he could bear to rub his body with such
a bad-smelling substance, he answered by another question, “Do not
you whites use Eau-de-Cologne?”
The blacks also use the skin of the musk or civet-cat, which is very
common in the interior, to scent their cloths and bodies. The smell of
this animal is so powerful that the clothes of a person passing
through grass where one has previously been, acquire such a strong
smell of musk as to retain it perceptibly for days.
Angola is poor in dyes, and only a few are employed by the
blacks. For red they use the fresh pulp enveloping the seeds of the
“annatto” (Bixa Orellana); for yellow they employ yellow ginger. The
Quissamas and some of the natives on the River Quanza dye their
cloths of a bluish-black with the black mud of the river, mixed with
the infusion of a plant that I believe to be a species of indigo. Cloths
are also made black by rubbing them with charred ground-nuts
reduced to a fine paste, and, as already mentioned, a fine red for
painting their faces, bodies, and houses, is obtained by rubbing
tacula-wood to a pulp with water on a rough stone, and drying the
resulting paste.
Large land-lizards are rare except at Benguella, where they
abound. They are brown, and from two to three feet long. I tried very
often to preserve them alive, but without success, although I gave
them every kind of food I could think of. A very long yellow-spotted
water-lizard (Monitor Niloticus), with a handsome bead-like pattern
on its back and legs, and as much as six or eight feet long, is
common in the rivers, and is said to be very destructive to poultry.
The natives state that this lizard feeds upon the eggs and young of
the alligator.
Snakes are nowhere very abundant—I may say singularly scarce;
and in the years that I have travelled in Angola I have not only never
trodden on or been attacked by one, but have only seen them a very
few times. The most common is the boa-constrictor, but only in the
marshy places near rivers. In these the River Jack (Clotho
nasicornis) is also found; one of these which had been caught in a
fish-basket set to catch “Bagre” in the River Luqueia, was brought
alive to me at Bembe. It was a very fine one and very brilliantly
marked. I kept it in a large box covered with wire-gauze. It lived for
several months, and died a natural death shortly after shedding its
skin. It is called “Uta-maza” (water-snake) by the natives, and is held
in the greatest fear by them, its bite being said to be deadly, and no
antidote or cure for it known. I can well believe this from witnessing
the effect of its bite on the live rats with which I fed it.
I was obliged to feed it on live rats, as it refused to eat any kind of
animal or bird that it had not itself killed. If I placed a dead rat in its
cage with the live one, I would find in the morning it had swallowed
the one it had killed, but had left the dead one. On placing a rat in
the cage, the snake, which was generally coiled up in a corner,
would lift up its head and hiss slightly at the rat, which seemed
conscious of its danger, and would run about seeking for some
means of escape. The snake would continue to watch it with uplifted
head till it passed close enough, when it would suddenly strike it a
blow with incredible rapidity, the action being so instantaneous that I
could never see how the fangs were projected forwards, or, in fact,
how the blow was delivered. The poor rat would only give a small
squeak on receiving the blow, run a few paces, then stagger, fall on
its side, stretch itself out, and die after a few feeble convulsions.
This snake would never make more than one dart at its prey, and
would only swallow it at night; and although I watched it for hours in
perfect quiet, and with a shaded light, I never succeeded in seeing it
eat.
There is a dangerous snake (Naja heje) not uncommon about
Benguella. It is small in size, but remarkable from its habit of spitting
to a considerable distance, and its saliva is said to blind a person if it
touches the eyes. It is called “Cuspideira” by the Portuguese. One of
these snakes was captured by the natives and brought to the mine at
Cuio, where it was placed in a cage. An English miner was standing
over the cage, which was on the ground, teasing the snake with a
stick; when it spat up in his face, and he felt some of the liquid enter
one of his eyes. He immediately had it washed out with water, but
the eye was very much irritated for several days after. I was absent
at the time, and the snake was unfortunately destroyed, but I have
no reason for doubting the miner’s statement or that of his
companions, corroborated as it is by that of the natives and
Portuguese. A harmless snake is found under floorings of houses
and stores, and is very useful in ridding them of rats and mice.
One of these snakes once gave me considerable trouble at
Loanda. My bedroom was on the ground-floor under an office, and
outside my door was the staircase leading to it. Every morning, just a
little before daybreak, I used to be awakened by hearing a loud crack
on the table as if made by a blow from a thick whip. This excited my
curiosity greatly, as I could find no possible explanation for the noise.
At last I determined to be on the watch. I had lucifers and a candle
ready, and was luckily awake when I heard the noise repeated on my
table. I instantly struck a light, and saw a snake about six feet long
glide off the table on to the ground and quickly disappear in a hole in
a corner of the room. I then ascertained that Mr. Snake went up the
staircase every night to the office above, where he hunted about for
rats, and towards morning returned through a hole in the flooring
immediately above my table, dropping a height of about ten feet, and
producing the whip-like sound that had so perplexed me for many
nights. A bung in the hole in the floor above stopped his return that
way for the future, but I could not help being thankful that my bed
had not been placed where the table stood, for, notwithstanding that
I believed it was simply a harmless and inoffensive ratcatcher, still
six feet of cold snake wriggling over my face and body might not
have been quite pleasant in the dark.
We collected a number of sphynx-moths, both at Ambriz and on
the road to Bembe. At Ambriz they always came to the flowers of the
shrubby jasmine I have described as being so abundant near the
coast (Corrissa sp.) Farther inland we saw them flitting about only on
the white flowers of a herbaceous plant (Gynandropsis pentaphylla,
D.C.), a very common weed, particularly around the towns and in
open, cleared spaces.
A large scarabæus beetle (which my friend, Mr. H. W. Bates, finds
to be a new species, and has named Ateuchus Angolensis) is very
abundant wherever cow-dung is found; and it is amusing to see them
at work, making it up into balls nearly the size of a billiard-ball, an
egg having been deposited in each. Two or three may often be seen
pushing the ball along backwards—the custom of these beetles
everywhere. I once saw a curious episode at Ambriz:—one beetle
was on the top of a ball fussing about as if directing two others that
were pushing it along with all their might; suddenly he came down
and commenced fighting with one of them, and after a hard tussle
(during which they made quite a perceptible hissing noise), beat him
off and took his place.
I discovered at Benguella a very beautiful lemur, named by Mr. A.
D. Bartlett the Galago Monteiri, and described and figured in the
‘Proceedings of the Zoological Society’ (June 1863). It is of a light,
chinchilla-grey colour, with black nose and ears, and dark brown feet
and toes. This animal can turn back and crumple up its rather large
and long ears at will. Its tail is long, and, like the rest of the body,
very furry. It is very quiet and gentle, nocturnal in its habits, and
sleeps much during the day. The natives use its long, fine fur to
stanch bleeding from cuts or wounds.
CHAPTER XI.
CONCLUSION.
I have now brought to a close my description of a small portion of

the terra incognita, comparatively speaking, of Africa, and it may not
be out of place, in conclusion, to note those results of my long
experience in Angola that bear on the important questions of the
civilization and mental advancement of the negro race, and the
material development of tropical Africa.
I have given the reasons that have convinced me of the
rudimentary quality of the negro intellect, naturally corresponding to
the peculiar insensibility of his organization, the result of the “natural
selection” that, through perhaps thousands of years of struggling
against malaria, has at last resulted in his adaptability to inhabit with
perfect impunity what to the white race is the deadly, unhealthy
climate of a great part of tropical Africa. I have also attempted to
show that the malignity of the climate of the West Coast is, as I
believe, principally due to its low level, and that this unhealthy
character or influence is continued in many places far inland,
although perhaps resulting from other causes.
From the mental constitution of the race, and the impossibility of
ameliorating the climate, I can see no hope of the negro ever
attaining to any considerable degree of civilization, owing to his
incapacity for spontaneously developing to a higher or more perfect
condition, and the impossibility of the white race peopling his country
in sufficient numbers to enforce his civilization; consequently, should
science not discover a means for the successful combating of the
African climate, the negro must ever remain as he has always been,
and as he is at the present day.
The greatest good or improvement we can hope for is, that in the
comparatively healthy parts, as Angola for instance, the more
barbarous customs or habits may be abolished by the more intimate
contact with Europeans; but even this gain or advantage will not be
an unmixed good, as it will be counterbalanced by the creation of an
amount of vice and immorality unknown to the negro in his native or
unsophisticated state.
That this is not an imaginary result, but one inevitably following the
contact of the white race with one of so inferior a type as the negro,
is, for example, notably evidenced at Sierra Leone. The contact of
the Portuguese with the natives of Angola, however, does not appear
to have acted so prejudicially as ours in Sierra Leone, for although
there is not much difference for the better in the morals of the whites
or of the civilized natives, the latter certainly have not the astounding
impudence and cant of the Sierra Leone blacks. It is true that in
Angola the natives have not been muddled by the present style of
missionary work, which I am sorry to say is not only nearly useless,
but must be blamed as the cause of the above very objectionable
characteristics. It does seem a pity that so much money and well-
intentioned zeal should for so many years have been expended on
the negro of British West Africa with an almost negative result.
There is more hope for the development of the material resources
of tropical Africa. The negro is capable of being acted upon to a
certain extent by the desire for something more than the absolute
necessaries of life, to satisfy which he is willing to work a little. The
country is so extensive, and the soil and natural productions so rich,
that a very little exertion on the part of the population suffices to
bring forth a considerable amount of produce; but another and more
industrious race will have to take the place of the negro in Africa if its
riches and capabilities are to be fully developed.
The introduction of Coolies and Chinese into tropical Africa would,
in my opinion, be the most important and valuable step that could be
devised. The starving millions of China and other parts of the East
would find in Africa a congenial climate, and a bountiful reward for
their industry, with the greatest benefit to themselves and the rest of
mankind. The useless negroes would then sooner follow their
apparent fate of future extinction, or become merged into a more
highly organized and industrious race.

Relativity Principles and Theories From Galileo To Einstein Olivier Darrigol Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Relativity Principles and Theories From Galileo To Einstein Olivier Darrigol Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Relativity Principles and Theories from

Galileo to Einstein Olivier Darrigol

Special relativity, electrodynamics, and general

Covariant Physics - From Classical Mechanics to General

Evil Lords: Theories and Representations of Tyranny

Relativity Made Relatively Easy. Volume 2: General

Relativity without spacetime Cosgrove

Shape Dynamics: Relativity and Relationalism Flavio

Dialogue on the Two Greatest World Systems Galileo

Digital Solutions: Reframing Leadership Olivier Serrat

Research Director, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique: SPHere

1 Rethinking motion in the seventeenth century 1

2 Deriving Newton’s second law from relativity principles 28

3 The space–time–inertia tangle 52

4 The optics of moving bodies 84

5 The electrodynamics of moving bodies 118

5.6 The separation of ether and matter 141

6 Poincaré’s relativity theory 157

7 The relativity theory of Einstein, Minkowski, and Laue 188

8 From Riemann to Ricci 236

9 Mostly Einstein: To general relativity 269

10 Mesh and measure in early general relativity 341

10.5 The advance of Mercury’s perihelion 375

¹ Einstein [1921], p. 431.

¹ Galilei 1632, p. 255.

1.1 Galileo’s science of motion

⁶ Galilei 1632, pp. 116, 255.

The laws of free fall

⁹ Galilei 1632, pp. 171 (citation), 154–155 (canon).

The definition of motion

1.2 Beeckman and Descartes on free fall

1.3 Descartes’s world

²³ Descartes [1633]; 1644, p. 140.

1.4 Newton’s laws of motion

m1 ῡ1 + m2 ῡ2 = (m1 + m2 )ῡ′ (1.1)

In symbols, this statement reads

m1 v1 + m2 v2 = m1 v1′ + m1 v2 ′ since m1 v1′ – m1 v1 = I21 = –I12 = m2 v2 – m2 v2 ′. (1.2)

³⁷ Newton [c. 1665], f. 11r.

When measured by the quantity of motion (momentum) it may produce or destroy, an

1.5 Huygens’s mechanics

v2 ′ – u = –(v2 – u). (1.5)

v2 ′ – v1′ = –(v2 – v1 ). (1.6)

of momentum conservation, which Huygens has indeed enunciated in a brief communi-

⁴⁸ Huygens 1669. On Schütz’s derivation, see pp. 49–50, this volume.

Fig. 1.2. Huygens’ contraption for the horizontal sliding of a body

f = Φ(r̈, ⃛r, ...)r̈ (1.9)

Motion, inertia, and relativity

⁵² Newton 1687, p. 11; 1729, Vol. 1, p. 18.

¹ Bélanger 1847, p. III.

2.1 Rational mechanics in the eighteenth century

ṙ(t + τ) = ṙ(t) + Φ[f(t)]τ, or r̈ = Φ(f). (2.1)

I have now brought to a close my description of a small portion of

You might also like