The History of Physics (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Physics is the science of matter and its behaviour and motion. It is one of the oldest scientific disciplines. The first written work of physics with that title was Aristotle's Physics.

Elements of what became physics were drawn primarily from the fields of astronomy, optics, and mechanics, which were methodologically united through the study of geometry. These disciplines began in Antiquity with the Babylonians and with Hellenistic writers such as Archimedes and Ptolemy, then passed on to the Arabic-speaking world where they were critiqued and developed into a more physical and experimental tradition by scientists such as Ibn al-Haytham and Abū Rayhān Bīrūnī, before eventually passing on to Western Europe where they were studied by scholars such as Roger Bacon and Witelo. They were thought of as technical in character and many philosophers generally did not perceive their descriptive content as representing a philosophically significant knowledge of the natural world. Similar mathematical traditions also existed in ancient Chinese and Indian sciences.

Meanwhile, philosophy, including what was called “physics”, focused on explanatory (rather than descriptive) schemes developed around the Aristotelian idea of the four types of “causes”. According to Aristotelian and, later, Scholastic physics, things moved in the way that they did because it was part of their essential nature to do so. Celestial objects were thought to move in circles, because perfect circular motion was considered an innate property of objects that existed in the uncorrupted realm of the celestial spheres. The theory of impetus, led to the concepts of inertia and momentum, also belonged to this philosophical tradition, and was developed by medieval philosophers such as John Philoponus, Avicenna and Jean Buridan. The physical traditions in ancient China and India were also largely philosophical.

In the philosophical tradition of “physics”, motions below the lunar sphere were seen as imperfect, and thus could not be expected to exhibit consistent motion. More idealized motion in the “sublunary” realm could only be achieved through artifice, and prior to the 17th century, many philosophers did not view artificial experiments as a valid means of learning about the natural world. Instead, physical explanations in the sublunary realm revolved around tendencies. Stones contained the element earth, and earthy objects tended to move in a straight line toward the center of the universe (which the earth was supposed to be situated around) unless otherwise prevented from doing so. Other physical explanations, which would not later be considered within the bounds of physics, followed similar reasoning. For instance, people tended to think, because people were, by their essential nature, thinking animals [10, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_physics].

1.2.4 Look through the text and find the English equivalents for the following Russian phrases and word-combinations:

древнегреческие писатели; многие философы в общем не воспринимали; природное свойство; которые существовали в неискаженной сфере; теория движущей силы.