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Mechanics 𓆩⚪𓆪｜Definition｜1st｜20251119205401-00-⌔
Mechanics
Mechanics (from Ancient Greek μηχανική * (mēkhanikḗ)* ‘of machines’)12 is the area of physics concerned with the relationships between force, matter, and motion among physical objects.3 Forces applied to objects may result in displacements, which are changes of an object’s position relative to its environment.
Theoretical expositions of this branch of physics have their origins in Ancient Greece, for instance, in the writings of Aristotle and Archimedes456 (see History of classical mechanics and Timeline of classical mechanics). During the early modern period, scientists such as Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Christiaan Huygens, and Isaac Newton laid the foundation for what is now known as classical mechanics.
In the 20th century the concepts of classical mechanics were challenged by new discoveries, leading to fundamentally new approaches including relativistic mechanics and quantum mechanics.
Printed 2026-06-28.
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Link to original Footnotes
“mechanics”. Oxford English Dictionary. 1933. ↩
Henry George Liddell; Robert Scott (1940). “mechanics”. A Greek-English Lexicon. ↩
Young, Hugh D.; Roger A. Freedman; A. Lewis Ford; Katarzyna Zulteta Estrugo (2020). Sears and Zemansky’s university physics: with modern physics (15th ed.). Harlow: Pearson Education. p. 62. ISBN 978-1-292-31473-0. OCLC 1104689918. ↩
Dugas, Rene. A History of Classical Mechanics. New York, NY: Dover Publications Inc, 1988, pg 19. ↩
Rana, N.C., and Joag, P.S. Classical Mechanics. West Petal Nagar, New Delhi. Tata McGraw-Hill, 1991, pg 6. ↩
Renn, J., Damerow, P., and McLaughlin, P. Aristotle, Archimedes, Euclid, and the Origin of Mechanics: The Perspective of Historical Epistemology. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2010, pg 1-2. ↩
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