On the Past and Future of Natural Philosophy
@article{Noll2006OnTP,
title={On the Past and Future of Natural Philosophy},
author={Walter Noll},
journal={Journal of Elasticity},
year={2006},
volume={84},
pages={1-11}
}“.... the term 'natural philosophy', which is a rendering of Aristotle’s 'physics', was appropriated in the 17th century to the new natural science of Galileo and Newton... Apparently this usage continued in England when it had become obsolete in other countries. And even now there are survivals of this usage.....and there are professors of 'natural philosophy' who are engaged in nuclear research. ”
10 Citations
“Reality” and Representation in Mechanics: The Legacy of Walter Noll
- 2018
Geology
Journal of Elasticity
The foundations of the mechanics of generalized continua are revisited in the light of the theoretical progress made in the last decades. The paper includes a summary of the scientific activity of W.…
Correction to: “Reality” and Representation in Mechanics: The Legacy of Walter Noll
- 2019
Geology
Journal of Elasticity
The foundations of the mechanics of generalized continua are revisited in the light of the theoretical progress made in the last decades. The paper includes a summary of the scientific activity of W.…
Scientific Life and Works of Walter Noll
- 2019
History
Journal of Elasticity
Walter Noll (1925–2017) was an American mathematician of German birth who made lasting contributions to the foundations of continuum physics and the classical non-linear field theory. This essay is…
A Rudimentary History of Dynamics
- 2009
Art
This article presents a condensed overview of the development of dynamics from Ancient Greece through to the late 18th century. Its purpose is to bring an often neglected topic to the control…
On the Depletion Effect in Colloids: Correlated Brownian Motions
- 2008
Physics, Mathematics
Our object is to formulate and analyze a physically plausible and mathematically sound model to better understand the phenomenon of clumping in colloid dispersions. Our model is stochastic but…
Correlated Brownian motions and the depletion effect in colloids
- 2009
Mathematics
We briefly review the derivation of a system of N correlated Brownian motions as a kinematic mesoscopic limit for a system of nonlinear deterministic oscillators consisting of N large (solute)…
A mechanical model for heat conduction
- 2019
Physics, Engineering
Continuum Mechanics and Thermodynamics
A theory of heat conduction in rigid heat conductors based entirely on mechanical concepts is proposed and compared with the traditional thermodynamic theories.
A mechanical model for heat conduction
- 2019
Physics, Engineering
Continuum Mechanics and Thermodynamics
A theory of heat conduction in rigid heat conductors based entirely on mechanical concepts is proposed and compared with the traditional thermodynamic theories.
16 References
Mathematical Structures of Special Relativity
- 1993
Physics, Education
This book is primarily intended to be a textbook for undergraduate students majoring in mathematics or in physics. Most, if not all, of the existing textbooks on Relativity use verbal descriptions…
Fit regions and functions of bounded variation
- 1988
Physics
Ever since one of us (W. N.) began the attempt to analyze some of the basic concepts of continuum physics in terms of precise mathematical structures about thirty years ago (see [N1]), it was clear…
The Non-Linear Field Theories Of Mechanics
- 1965
Physics
Matter is commonly found in the form of materials. Analytical mechanics turned its back upon this fact, creating the centrally useful but abstract concepts of the mass point and the rigid body, in…
A Frame-Free Formulation of Elasticity
- 2006
Philosophy
As I pointed out at the end of Sect. 4 in [6] of my booklet Five Contributions to Natural Philosophy, it should be possible to make the principle of material frame-indifference vacuously satisfied by…
A new mathematical theory of simple materials
- 1972
Physics
The original theory of simple materials was formulated by me in 1958 in reference [N2]. I proposed this theory in an attempt to unify and clarify the confusing variety of theories of mechanical…
Isocategories and tensor functors
- 1992
Mathematics
In this paper, I show how the concepts of an isocategory (category all of whose morphisms are isomorphisms) and the corresponding concept of an isofunctor can be used to improve the conceptual…