Timeline of classical mechanics

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The following is a timeline of the history of classical mechanics:

Antiquity

4th century BC – Aristotle invents the system of Aristotelian physics, which is later largely disproved
4th century BC – Babylonian astronomers calculate Jupiter's position using the Trapezoidal rule^[1]
260 BC – Archimedes works out the principle of the lever and connects buoyancy to weight
60 – Hero of Alexandria writes Metrica, Mechanics (on means to lift heavy objects), and Pneumatics (on machines working on pressure)
350 – Themistius states, that static friction is larger than kinetic friction^[2]

Early mechanics

6th century – John Philoponus introduces the concept of impetus^[3] and the theory was modified by Avicenna in the 11th century and Ibn Malka al-Baghdadi in the 12th century
6th century – John Philoponus says that by observation, two balls of very different weights will fall at nearly the same speed. He therefore tests the equivalence principle
1021 – Al-Biruni uses three orthogonal coordinates to describe point in space^[4]
1100–1138 – Avempace develops the concept of a fatigue, which according to Shlomo Pines is precursor to Leibnizian idea of force^[5]
1100–1165 – Hibat Allah Abu'l-Barakat al-Baghdaadi discovers that force is proportional to acceleration rather than speed, a fundamental law in classical mechanics^[6]

1340–1358 – Jean Buridan develops the theory of impetus
14th century – Oxford Calculators and French collaborators prove the mean speed theorem
14th century – Nicole Oresme derives the times-squared law for uniformly accelerated change.^[7] Oresme, however, regarded this discovery as a purely intellectual exercise having no relevance to the description of any natural phenomena, and consequently failed to recognise any connection with the motion of accelerating bodies^[8]
1500–1528 – Al-Birjandi develops the theory of "circular inertia" to explain Earth's rotation^[9]
16th century – Francesco Beato and Luca Ghini experimentally contradict Aristotelian view on free fall.^[10]
16th century – Domingo de Soto suggests that bodies falling through a homogeneous medium are uniformly accelerated.^[11]^[12] Soto, however, did not anticipate many of the qualifications and refinements contained in Galileo's theory of falling bodies. He did not, for instance, recognise, as Galileo did, that a body would fall with a strictly uniform acceleration only in a vacuum, and that it would otherwise eventually reach a uniform terminal velocity
1581 – Galileo Galilei notices the timekeeping property of the pendulum
1589 – Galileo Galilei uses balls rolling on inclined planes to show that different weights fall with the same acceleration
1638 – Galileo Galilei publishes Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (which were materials science and kinematics) where he develops, amongst other things, Galilean transformation
1644 – René Descartes suggests an early form of the law of conservation of momentum
1645 – Ismaël Bullialdus argues that "gravity" weakens as the inverse square of the distance^[13]
1651 – Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Francesco Maria Grimaldi discover the Coriolis effect
1658 – Christiaan Huygens experimentally discovers that balls placed anywhere inside an inverted cycloid reach the lowest point of the cycloid in the same time and thereby experimentally shows that the cycloid is the tautochrone
1668 – John Wallis suggests the law of conservation of momentum
1673 – Christiaan Huygens publishes his Horologium Oscillatorium. Huygens describes in this work the first two laws of motion.^[14] The book is also the first modern treatise in which a physical problem (the accelerated motion of a falling body) is idealized by a set of parameters and then analyzed mathematically.
1676–1689 – Gottfried Leibniz develops the concept of vis viva, a limited theory of conservation of energy
1677 – Baruch Spinoza puts forward a primitive notion of Newton's first law

Newtonian mechanics

1687 – Isaac Newton publishes his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in which he formulates Newton's laws of motion and Newton's law of universal gravitation
1690 – James Bernoulli shows that the cycloid is the solution to the tautochrone problem
1691 – Johann Bernoulli shows that a chain freely suspended from two points will form a catenary
1691 – James Bernoulli shows that the catenary curve has the lowest center of gravity of any chain hung from two fixed points
1696 – Johann Bernoulli shows that the cycloid is the solution to the brachistochrone problem
1710 – Jakob Hermann shows that Laplace–Runge–Lenz vector is conserved for a case of the inverse-square central force^[15]
1714 – Brook Taylor derives the fundamental frequency of a stretched vibrating string in terms of its tension and mass per unit length by solving an ordinary differential equation
1733 – Daniel Bernoulli derives the fundamental frequency and harmonics of a hanging chain by solving an ordinary differential equation
1734 – Daniel Bernoulli solves the ordinary differential equation for the vibrations of an elastic bar clamped at one end
1739 – Leonhard Euler solves the ordinary differential equation for a forced harmonic oscillator and notices the resonance
1742 – Colin Maclaurin discovers his uniformly rotating self-gravitating spheroids
1743 – Jean le Rond d'Alembert publishes his Traite de Dynamique, in which he introduces the concept of generalized forces and D'Alembert's principle
1747 – D'Alembert and Alexis Clairaut publish first approximate solutions to the three-body problem
1749 – Leonhard Euler derives equation for Coriolis acceleration
1759 – Leonhard Euler solves the partial differential equation for the vibration of a rectangular drum
1764 – Leonhard Euler examines the partial differential equation for the vibration of a circular drum and finds one of the Bessel function solutions
1776 – John Smeaton publishes a paper on experiments relating power, work, momentum and kinetic energy, and supporting the conservation of energy

Analytical mechanics

1788 – Joseph-Louis Lagrange presents Lagrange's equations of motion in the Méchanique Analytique
1798 – Pierre-Simon Laplace publishes his Traité de mécanique céleste vol.1 and lasts vol.5 in 1825. In this, he summarized and extended the work of his predecessors
1803 – Louis Poinsot develops idea of angular momentum conservation (this result was previously known only in the case of conservation of areal velocity)
1813 – Peter Ewart supports the idea of the conservation of energy in his paper "On the measure of moving force"
1821 – William Hamilton begins his analysis of Hamilton's characteristic function and Hamilton–Jacobi equation
1829 – Carl Friedrich Gauss introduces Gauss's principle of least constraint
1834 – Carl Jacobi discovers his uniformly rotating self-gravitating ellipsoids
1834 – Louis Poinsot notes an instance of the intermediate axis theorem^[16]
1835 – William Hamilton states Hamilton's canonical equations of motion
1838 – Liouville begins work on Liouville's theorem
1841 – Julius von Mayer, an amateur scientist, writes a paper on the conservation of energy but his lack of academic training leads to a priority dispute.
1847 – Hermann von Helmholtz formally states the law of conservation of energy
first half of the 19th century – Cauchy develops his momentum equation and his stress tensor
1851 – Léon Foucault shows the Earth's rotation with a huge pendulum (Foucault pendulum)
1870 – Rudolf Clausius deduces virial theorem
1890 – Henri Poincaré discovers the sensibility of initial conditions in the three-body problem.^[17]
1898 – Jacques Hadamard discusses the Hadamard billiards.^[18]

Modern developments

1900 – Max Planck introduces the idea of quanta, introducing quantum mechanics
1902 – James Jeans finds the length scale required for gravitational perturbations to grow in a static nearly homogeneous medium
1905 – Albert Einstein first mathematically describes Brownian motion and introduces relativistic mechanics
1915 – Emmy Noether proves Noether's theorem, from which conservation laws are deduced
1915 – Albert Einstein introduces general relativity
1923 – Élie Cartan introduces the geometrized Newtonian gravitation, treating Newtonian gravitation in terms of spacetime.^[19]
1931–1932 – Bernard Koopman and John von Neumann papers led to the development of Koopman–von Neumann classical mechanics.^[20]
1952 – Parker develops a tensor form of the virial theorem^[21]
1954 – Andrey Kolmogorov publishes the first version of the Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser theorem.^[18]
1961 – Edward Norton Lorenz discovers Lorenz systems and establishes the field of chaos theory.^[18]
1978 – Vladimir Arnold states precise form of Liouville–Arnold theorem^[22]
1983 – Mordehai Milgrom proposes modified Newtonian dynamics as an alternative to the dark matter hypothesis
1988 – Jeff Xia shows that non-collisional singularities exist in classical gravity according to Painlevé conjecture.^[23]
1992 – Udwadia and Kalaba create Udwadia–Kalaba equation
2003 – John D. Norton introduces Norton's dome

References

[1]
Ossendrijver, Mathieu (29 Jan 2016). "Ancient Babylonian astronomers calculated Jupiter's position from the area under a time-velocity graph". Science. 351 (6272): 482–484. Bibcode:2016Sci...351..482O. doi:10.1126/science.aad8085. PMID 26823423. S2CID 206644971. Retrieved 29 January 2016.
[2]
Sambursky, Samuel (2014). The Physical World of Late Antiquity. Princeton University Press. pp. 65–66. ISBN 978-1-4008-5898-9.
[3]
Sorabji, Richard (2010). "John Philoponus". Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science (2nd ed.). Institute of Classical Studies, University of London. p. 47. ISBN 978-1-905-67018-5. JSTOR 44216227. OCLC 878730683.
[4]
O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Al-Biruni", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews:
"One of the most important of al-Biruni's many texts is Shadows which he is thought to have written around 1021. [...] Shadows is an extremely important source for our knowledge of the history of mathematics, astronomy, and physics. It also contains important ideas such as the idea that acceleration is connected with non-uniform motion, using three rectangular coordinates to define a point in 3-space, and ideas that some see as anticipating the introduction of polar coordinates."
[5]
Shlomo Pines (1964), "La dynamique d'Ibn Bajja", in Mélanges Alexandre Koyré, I, 442–468 [462, 468], Paris.
(cf. Abel B. Franco (October 2003). "Avempace, Projectile Motion, and Impetus Theory", Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (4), p. 521-546 [543]: "Pines has also seen Avempace's idea of fatigue as a precursor to the Leibnizian idea of force which, according to him, underlies Newton's third law of motion and the concept of the "reaction" of forces.")
[6]
Pines, Shlomo (1970). "Abu'l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī, Hibat Allah". Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. pp. 26–28. ISBN 0-684-10114-9.:
(cf. Abel B. Franco (October 2003). "Avempace, Projectile Motion, and Impetus Theory", Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (4), p. 521-546 [528]: Hibat Allah Abu'l-Barakat al-Bagdadi (c.1080- after 1164/65) extrapolated the theory for the case of falling bodies in an original way in his Kitab al-Mu'tabar (The Book of that Which is Established through Personal Reflection). [...] This idea is, according to Pines, "the oldest negation of Aristotle's fundamental dynamic law [namely, that a constant force produces a uniform motion]," and is thus an "anticipation in a vague fashion of the fundamental law of classical mechanics [namely, that a force applied continuously produces acceleration].")
[7]
Clagett (1968, p. 561), Nicole Oresme and the Medieval Geometry of Qualities and Motions; a treatise on the uniformity and difformity of intensities known as Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 0-299-04880-2.
[8]
Grant, 1996, p.103.
[9]
F. Jamil Ragep (2001), "Tusi and Copernicus: The Earth's Motion in Context", Science in Context 14 (1–2), p. 145–163. Cambridge University Press.
[10]
"Timeline of Classical Mechanics and Free Fall". www.scientus.org. Retrieved 2019-01-26.
[11]
Sharratt, Michael (1994). Galileo: Decisive Innovator. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-56671-1, p. 198
[12]
Wallace, William A. (2004). Domingo de Soto and the Early Galileo. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. ISBN 0-86078-964-0 (pp. II 384, II 400, III 272)
[13]
Ismail Bullialdus, Astronomia Philolaica … (Paris, France: Piget, 1645), page 23.
[14]
Rob Iliffe & George E. Smith (2016). The Cambridge Companion to Newton. Cambridge University Press. p. 75. ISBN 978-1-107-01546-3.
[15]
Hermann, J (1710). "Unknown title". Giornale de Letterati d'Italia. 2: 447–467.
Hermann, J (1710). "Extrait d'une lettre de M. Herman à M. Bernoulli datée de Padoüe le 12. Juillet 1710". Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences. 1732: 519–521.
[16]
Poinsot (1834) Theorie Nouvelle de la Rotation des Corps, Bachelier, Paris
[17]
Poincaré, H. (January 1900). "Introduction". Acta Mathematica. 13 (1–2): 5–7. doi:10.1007/BF02392506. ISSN 0001-5962.
[18]
Oestreicher, Christian (2007-09-30). "A history of chaos theory". Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience. 9 (3): 279–289. doi:10.31887/DCNS.2007.9.3/coestreicher. ISSN 1958-5969. PMC 3202497. PMID 17969865.
[19]
Malament, David B. (2012-04-02). Topics in the Foundations of General Relativity and Newtonian Gravitation Theory. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-50247-2.
[20]
Joseph, Ilon (2020-10-19). "Koopman--von Neumann approach to quantum simulation of nonlinear classical dynamics". Physical Review Research. 2 (4) 043102. arXiv:2003.09980. Bibcode:2020PhRvR...2d3102J. doi:10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.043102.
[21]
Parker, E.N. (1954). "Tensor Virial Equations". Physical Review. 96 (6): 1686–1689. Bibcode:1954PhRv...96.1686P. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.96.1686.
[22]
V. I. Arnold, Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics, Graduate Texts in Mathematics (Springer, New York, 1978), Vol. 60.
[23]
Xia, Zhihong (1992). "The Existence of Noncollision Singularities in Newtonian Systems". Annals of Mathematics. 135 (3): 411–468. doi:10.2307/2946572. ISSN 0003-486X.

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