Swinging and Rolling

This volume explores the reorginisation of knowledge taking place in the course of Galileo's research process extending over a period of more than thirty years, pursued within a network of exchanges with his contemporaries, and documented by a vast collection of research notes. It has revealed the challenging objects that motivated and shaped Galileo's thinking and closely followed the knowledge reorganization engendered by theses challenges. It has thus turned out, for example, that the problem of reducing the properties of pendulum motion to the laws governing naturally accelerated motion on inclined planes was the mainspring for the formation of Galileo's comprehensive theory of naturally accelerated motion.

Résumé
This volume explores the reorganisation of knowledge taking place in the course of Galileo's research process extending over a period of more than thirty years, pursued within a network of exchanges with his contemporaries, and documented by a vast collection of research notes. It has revealed the challenging objects that motivated and shaped Galileo's thinking and closely followed the knowledge reorganization engendered by theses challenges. It has thus turned out, for example, that the problem of reducing the properties of pendulum motion to the laws governing naturally accelerated motion on inclined planes was the mainspring for the formation of Galileo's comprehensive theory of naturally accelerated motion.

Contenu

1. Introduction, Novel Insights about accelerated motion: the challenge of pendulums and planes.- 2. Speaking the investigation of naturally accelerated motion: The broken chord approach.- 3. Early experimentation: The Pendulum Plane Experiment.- 4. Prerequisite for, or challenged by the new theory: The 'ex mechanics' proof of the Law of Chords.- 5. Foundational issues before 1604: Fundamental propositions, the mechanical method and problems with the concept of velocity. Conclusion, Appendix.