more from this thinker | more from this text
Full Idea
Descartes incorporated the conservation of what he called 'quantity of motion', by which he meant mass times speed.
Gist of Idea
Descartes said there was conservation of 'quantity of motion'
Source
report of René Descartes (The World [1631]) by David Papineau - Thinking about Consciousness App 2
Book Ref
Papineau,David: 'Thinking about Consciousness' [OUP 2004], p.234
A Reaction
Mass times velocity is now called 'momentum'. Is this the first ever conservation law? There are now lots of them.
| 24064 | If something is pushed, it pushes back [Aristotle] |
| 19673 | Galileo mathematised movement, and revealed its invariable component - acceleration [Galileo, by Meillassoux] |
| 20964 | Descartes said there was conservation of 'quantity of motion' [Descartes, by Papineau] |
| 15958 | Inertia rejects the Aristotelian idea of things having natural states, to which they return [Newton, by Alexander,P] |
| 20968 | Newton's Third Law implies the conservation of momentum [Newton, by Papineau] |
| 17018 | 2: Change of motion is proportional to the force [Newton] |
| 17019 | 3: All actions of bodies have an equal and opposite reaction [Newton] |
| 17017 | 1: Bodies rest, or move in straight lines, unless acted on by forces [Newton] |
| 22173 | Galileo refuted the Aristotelian theory that heavier objects fall faster [Okasha] |
| 22618 | In modern physics the first and second laws of motion (unlike the third) fail at extremes [Ingthorsson] |