May 7, 2018 — To be published by Beijing WPC
This work tells a tale that has crossed millennia: the story of our understanding of motion. It is a fresco painted by many generations of thinkers, each building with the tools at their disposal. From the ancient philosophers to the modern geometers, this book is animated by a single, unifying principle: mechanics is a geometry, and dynamics is the art of comparing a real motion to an ideal, axiomatically chosen one within that geometry. This principle illuminates the entire history of
mechanics not as a linear march toward truth, but as a series of shifts in the foundational axiom of what constitutes an “ideal” or “inertial” motion. To follow this thread, we must adopt a different paradigm from the orthodox history of science. motions. We descend this staircase until we reach the bottom step: the inertial motions themselves. Below them, there is nothing. They are the most primitive, irreducible ideal.
This 328 pages book begins with aristotle and ends with Feynman illustrating that the notion of rest to quantum mechanics, the motion is the Ariane thread. Download the Draft
