Motion, a Historical Survey
"Motion," or "movement," in its modern meaning, is change—or more precisely, change of the relative positions of bodies. The concept of motion thus involves the ideas of space and time. Kinematics, in the nineteenth century usually called "kinetics" or "phoronomics," is the science that deals exclusively with the geometrical and chronometrical aspects of motion, in contrast to dynamics, which considers force and mass in relation to motion. In medieval terminology, following Aristotelian tradition, "motion" (motus or kinesis) had a much wider significance, denoting any continuous change in quality, quantity, or place.
Early Concepts of Motion
Ever since the beginning of philosophical speculation and scientific analysis, the concept of motion has played a predominant role in Western thought. Anaximander of Miletus (sixth century BCE) saw in motion an eternal agent of the cosmos. For Heraclitus motion was a cosmological principle underlying all physical reality (panta rhei, "everything is in perpetual flow"). Yet in spite of their insistence on the universality of motion, neither Anaximander nor Heraclitus seems to have inquired into the nature of motion itself. The Eleatics were probably the first to do so, when they discovered the contradiction inherent in the idea of motion and consequently denied the reality of motion, relegating its appearance to the realm of illusions and deceptions.
This page contains 201 words.
Motion, a Historical Survey article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 3,651 words
(approx. 12 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Motion (physics) Article
