Mechanics and experimental physics

Abstract

Older-style histories of science that depicted the growth of science as a gradual accretion of new knowledge, and that devoted much attention to identifying when discoveries were made and by whom, allocated little space to the physics of the eighteenth century. Although some interesting discoveries, especially in relation to electricity, were acknowledged, the period was generally presented as a fallow one compared with the periods of dramatic advance in physical understanding that preceded and followed it. More recently, as historians have adopted a less restricted view of their task, eighteenth-century physics has come to be seen in a more favorable light: as the period when physics became..