文档介绍：Presidential Lecture presented at the
23rd Annual Conference of the American Society of Biomechanics
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA
October 23, 1999
A Genealogy of Biomechanics
R. Bruce Martin, .
ASB President 1998-1999
However arbitrary the numbering of our years may be, the turning of the century and the millennium offers an opportunity to think of our history, and our future. However, I am calling this a genealogy rather than a history because I want to emphasize the people who started the science of biomechanics, and to convey the notion that we inherit traits as well as knowledge from our scientific predecessors.
Histories of science usually begin with the ancient Greeks, who first left a record of human inquiry concerning the nature of the world in relationship to our powers of perception. Socrates, born 2400 years ago, taught that we could not begin to understand the world around us until we understood our own nature. As scientists who seek knowledge of the mechanics within their own bodies, and those of other living creatures, we share something of Socrates' inward inquiry. Fortunately, we do not share the public abuse that he suffered, and which led him, as an old man of 70, to be tried, convicted, and executed for "impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens."
The execution of Socrates had a profound affect on Plato, 51 years his junior and a member of the Athenian aristocracy. He began the philosophical inquiries that set forth most of the important problems and concepts of Western philosophy, psychology, and logic, as well as politics. Plato postulated a realm of ideas that existed independently of the sensory world, and considered observations and experiments worthless. However, he also believed that mathematics, a system of pure ideas, was the best tool for the pursuit of knowledge. His conceptualization of mathematics as the life force of science created the necessary womb for the birth and growth of mechanics.
At age 17, Ar