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History of gravitational theory. In physics, theories of gravitation postulate mechanisms of interaction governing the movements of bodies with mass. There have been numerous theories of gravitation since ancient times. The first extant sources discussing such theories are found in ancient Greek philosophy.
Newton's law has later been superseded by Albert Einstein 's theory of general relativity, but the universality of the gravitational constant is intact and the law still continues to be used as an excellent approximation of the effects of gravity in most applications. Relativity is required only when there is a need for extreme accuracy, or when dealing with very strong gravitational fields ...
The World, also called Treatise on the Light (French title: Traité du monde et de la lumière), is a book by René Descartes (1596–1650). Written between 1629 and 1633, it contains a nearly complete version of his philosophy, from method, to metaphysics, to physics and biology. Descartes espoused mechanical philosophy, a form of natural ...
Descartes' vortex theory of planetary motion was later rejected by Newton in favor of his law of universal gravitation, and most of the second book of Newton's Principia is devoted to his counterargument.
Cartesianism is the philosophical and scientific system of René Descartes and its subsequent development by other seventeenth century thinkers, most notably François Poullain de la Barre, Nicolas Malebranche and Baruch Spinoza. [1] Descartes is often regarded as the first thinker to emphasize the use of reason to develop the natural sciences. [2] For him, philosophy was a thinking system ...
Mechanical explanations of gravitation (or kinetic theories of gravitation) are attempts to explain the action of gravity by aid of basic mechanical processes, such as pressure forces caused by pushes, without the use of any action at a distance.
Discourse on the Method is one of the most influential works in the history of modern philosophy, and important to the development of natural sciences. [2] In this work, Descartes tackles the problem of skepticism, which had previously been studied by other philosophers. While addressing some of his predecessors and contemporaries, Descartes modified their approach to account for a truth he ...
Quaestiones quaedam philosophicae. Quaestiones quaedam philosophicae (Certain philosophical questions) is the name given to a set of notes that Isaac Newton kept for himself during his earlier years in Cambridge. They concern questions in the natural philosophy of the day that interested him. Apart from the light it throws on the formation of ...