Deducing Newton's second law from relativity principles: a forgotten history (Q2285856)

In French textbooks of the mid-nineteenth century, Newton's second law of motion on the relationship of force and acceleration was derived from a ``principle of relative motion'', a name introduced by Jean-Baptiste Bélanger in 1847. After Newton, relativity principles were little used in mechanics, except in the context of the second law, and the author traces the history of relativity from Huygens to Einstein and conceptions of the second law in particular. The notion of relativity principle changed over the course of centuries but the core idea is that in a collection of particles, the effect of a force applied to one of the particles in terms of its relative motion with respect to the system is independent of any common motion of the collection. The origin is the Galilean argument that a ball dropped from the top of the mast of a ship would fall vertically with respect to the ship whether the ship was anchored or undergoing uniform motion. The author rounds up an impressive collection of writers on mechanics and statics including Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Huygens, Euler, D'Alembert, Laplace, Poisson, Coriolis, and Duhamel and gives a careful and detailed analysis of their contributions. Along the way we explore issues of statics and mechanics, the passage from instantaneous impulsive force to continuous forces and the status of the concept of ``force'' itself. Do mysterious forces exist, or are they mathematical constructs in the way that followers of D'Alembert \textit{defined} force as the product of mass and acceleration. To what extent are the laws of mechanics rationally derived or arise out of empirical observation? Which laws should be given axiomatic or primitive status and which derived from other more basic laws? What of the ether? What of Newtonian absolute space? What frames of reference and what types of motion are to be considered? The author's analysis of approaches to these and other questions provides a rich and thoughtful background to the following section on how these matters were presented in a wide collection of mechanics textbooks, and powerfully illuminates a corner of the history of mechanics.