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CHAPTER IV

DYNAMICS

The world had to wait for eighteen hundred years till the Greek mathematical physicists found successors. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of our era great Italians, in particular Leonardo da Vinci, the artist (born 1452, died 1519), and Galileo (born 1564, died 1642), rediscovered the secret, known to Archimedes, of relating abstract mathematical ideas with the experimental investigation of natural phenomena. Meanwhile the slow advance of mathematics and the accumulation of accurate astronomical knowledge had placed natural philosophers in a much more advantageous position for research. Also the very egoistic self-assertion of that age, its greediness for personal experience, led its thinkers to want to see for themselves what happened; and the secret of the relation of mathematical theory and experiment in inductive reasoning was practically discovered. It was an act eminently characteristic of the age that Galileo, a

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