NATURE’S DRAWING PROBLEMS AND RESOLUTIONS IN THE.pdf

NATURE’S DRAWING: PROBLEMS AND RESOLUTIONS IN THE MATHEMATIZATION OF MOTION Abstract The mathematization of motion around the turn of the 17th century involved the ascription of new ontological status to both motion and its mathematical depiction. For Kepler and Galileo geometrical curves were not ideal representations of motion, but traces left by nature itself, which the mathematician is called upon to analyze. In contrast to their Renaissance predecessors, for whom mathematical order was alien to motion, Kepler and Galileo construed nature in terms of pure motion, essentially mathematical, hence orderly. Their later century successors no longer conceived the application of mathematics to nature as requiring difficult metaphysical legitimation. For Huygens and Hooke the mathematical structure of nature resides in its malleability to the manipulations of the mathematician. The Resolution And I have not satisfied my soul with speculations of abstract Geometry, namely with pictures, “of what there is and what is not” to which the most famous geometers of today devote almost their entire time. But I have investigated the geometry that, by itself, expresses the body of the world following the traces of the Creator with sweat and heavy breath. (Kepler, Ad Vitellionem , Dedication to the Emperor)1 These are the words in which Kepler expresses his ideal of mathematical investigation of nature and these are the words with which Galileo introduces his readers to his great achievement in mathematical 1 “Neque animum explevi speculationibus Geometriae abstractae, picturis scilicet Και των οντων και μη οϖτων, in quibus pene sol