MECHANICS BY WILLIAM FOGG OSGOOD, PH. D., LL. D. PERKINS PROFESSOR
OF MATHEMATICS, EMERITUS IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY NEW YORK THE
MACMILLAN COMPANY 1949 COPYRIGHT, 1937, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
All rights reserved no part of this book may be reproduced in any
form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a
reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a
review written for inclusion in magazine or newspaper. Published
June, 1937. Reprints Nov. 1946. Reprinted, May, 1948. Reprinted
November, 1949 ST UP AND ELECTROTYPED BY J. S. GUSHING CO. PRINTED
IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PREFACE Mechanics is a natural
science, and like any natural science requires for its
comprehension the observation and knowledge of a vast fund of
individual cases. Arid so the solution of problems is of prime
importance throughout all the study of this subject. But Mechanics
is not an empirical subject in the sense in which physics and
chemistry, when dealing with the border region of tUe human
knowledge of the day are empirical. The latter take cognizance of a
great number of isolated facts, which it is not as yet possible to
arrange under a few laws, or postulates. The laws of Mechanics,
like the laws of Geometry, so far as first approxima tions go the
laws that explain the motion of the golf ball or the gyroscope or
the skidding automobile, and which make possible the calculation of
lunar tables and the prediction of eclipses these laws are known,
and will bo as new arid important two thousand years hence, as in
the recent past of science when first they emerged into the light
of day. Here, then, is the problem of training the student in
Mechanics to provide him with a vastfund of case material and to
develop in him the habits of thought which refer a new problem back
to the few fundamental laws of the subject. The physicist is keenly
alive to the first requirement and tries to meet it both by simple
laboratory experiments and by problems in the part of a general
course on physics which is especially devoted to Mechanics. The
interest of the mathematician too often begins with virtual
velocities and dAlemberts Principle, and the variational
principles, of which Hamiltons Principle is the most important.
Both arc right, in the sense that they are dping nothing that is
wrong but each takes such a fragmentary view of the whole subject,
that his work is ineffectual. The world in which the boy and girl
have lived is the true laboratory of elementary mechanics. The
tennis ball, the golf ball, the shell on the river the automobile
good old Model T, in its day, and the home-made autos and motor
boats which vi PREFACE youngsters construct and will continue to
construct the amateur printing press the games in which the
mechanics of the body is a part all these things go to provide the
student with rich laboratory experience before he begins a
systematic study of mechanics. It is this experience on which the
teacher of Mechanics can draw, and draw, and draw again. The
Cambridge Tripos of fifty years and more ago has been discredited
in recent years, and the criticism was not without foundation. It
was a method which turned out problem solvers so said its
opponents. But it turned out a Clerk Maxwell and it vitally
influenced the training of the whole group of English physicists,
whose work became so illustrious. In his interesting autobiography,
From Emigrant toInventor, Pupin acknowledges in no uncertain terms
the debt he owes to just this training, and to Arthur Gordon
Webster, through whom he first came to know this method a method
which Benjamin Osgood Peirce also prized highly in his work as a
physicist. And so we make no apologies for availing ourselves to
the fullest extent of that which the old Tripos Papers contributed
to training in Mechanics. But we do not stop there...
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