In his Specimen dynamicum of 1695, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, co-inventor of the calculus, proposed and named a “new science of dynamics” that would include forces or the causes of motion as well as their effects. 1 But even if not given that name, a science of dynamics had been in existence since the 14th century. 2 Its foundations were laid in 1328, when Thomas Bradwardine’s De proportionibus velocitatum in motibus (On the Proportions of Velocities in Motions ) presented a mathematical law linking any velocity to the proportion of motive to resistive forces causing it.
Aristotle, in Book VII of his Physics, had discussed a few cases relating forces, the bodies moved, distances, and times. He said, for instance, that if a given force moves a resisting body over a certain distance in a given time, then in the same time the same force will move half...
