Great Galileo: the principle of relativity and mechanical transformation

A great Italian scientist and natural scientistGalileo Galilei had a lasting historical influence on the development not only of specific sciences: physics, mechanics, astronomy, but also developed some fundamental principles for the development of science as a whole, Galileo's principle of relativity, Galileo's transformation had a significant influence on the formation of the present picture of the world.

The scientific motivation for Galileo's discovery of the principleRelativity became a doubt in the fidelity of formulas that reflect the acceleration of the motion of bodies. As is known, in the absence of acceleration in the motion of the system with respect to some other reference system, the acceleration of the body, relative to both these systems, will be constant.

Since earlier, according to Newton's laws,it was argued that precisely acceleration is the main parameter describing the kinematics of bodies (Newton's law 2), then the forces can be dependent only on the position and magnitude of the velocities of the bodies. Galileo questioned this dependence on the grounds that in this case all equations of mechanics will take the same form in any of the reference frames. The statement advanced by Galileo, the principle of relativity, asserts that the laws of mechanics can not depend on the system in which they are examined by us. This principle can be more simply represented in action as follows.

For example, if we conduct an experiment simultaneously in two rooms, where one moves relative to the other, the result of our experiment will be the same for both rooms.

The requirements, formulated by Galileo,principle of relativity, were perceived as a postulate. Together with the laws of Newton, these conclusions of Galileo, as well as his transformation, had a significant influence on the development of mechanics as a science.

The transformations of Galileo in the field of mechanics are alsopractically changed many of the prevailing ideas about mechanical processes. In particular, the laws of transformation of coordinates that occur during the transition from one reference frame to another assume the same time, and therefore the notion of "absolute time" is advanced. In this case, what Galileo claimed, the principle of relativity, appears as a special case of the Lorentz concept, and is applicable only for small velocities (relative to the speed of light, of course).

It should be said that before Galileo, physicsalmost universally studied by the works of Aristotle, they affirmed metaphysical ideas about nature and man. With regard specifically to physics, Aristotle, for example, argued that the speed of the fall of the body is directly proportional to its weight and that any movement occurs only as long as it is influenced by an "incentive". Galileo refuted these conclusions and formulated the correct ones, which reflect the true processes of the fall and the dependence of velocity on the mass of the body as it moves.

The formulated mechanical principleGalileo's relativity was first proposed in the book "Dialogue about two systems of the world". In the simplest statement, it sounds like this: for objects that move uniformly, this movement does not affect only those objects that do not participate in this movement. This statement allowed the scientist to completely disprove some postulates of astronomical heliocentrism, which stated that the very fact of the Earth's rotation influences the course of events that occur on it.

What Galileo claimed, the principlerelativity, its mechanistic transformations, philosophical reasoning became the basis for the discovery of many laws of physics after the death of the great scientist. These include, for example, the laws of conservation of energy, the laws of pendulum swing and frequency distribution, he predicted and even introduced into circulation such a fundamental physical concept as the moment of force.