X-Nico

unusual facts about Classical mechanics


Rabi frequency

The Rabi frequency is a semiclassical concept as it is based on a quantum atomic transition and a classical light field.


Charles Étienne Louis Camus

Charles Étienne Louis Camus (25 August 1699 – 2 February 1768), was a French mathematician and mechanician who was born at Crécy-en-Brie, near Meaux.

Closed system

In nonrelativistic classical mechanics, a closed system is a physical system which doesn't exchange any matter with its surroundings, and isn't subject to any force whose source is external to the system.

Eberhard Hopf

In 1930 he received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to study classical mechanics with George Birkhoff at Harvard, but his appointment was at the Harvard College Observatory.

Edmond Pourchot

Edmond Pourchot (1651, Poilly – 1734, Paris) was a university professor noted for his controversial advocacy of Cartesianism (and the Cartesian theory of mechanics) in place of Aristotelianism.

Left–right symmetry

The rule is absolutely valid in the classical mechanics of Newton and Einstein, but results from quantum mechanical experiments show a difference in the behavior of left-chiral versus right-chiral subatomic particles.

Lewis Carroll Epstein

Lewis Carroll Epstein is the author of layman's books on physics that use an idiosyncratic mix of cartoons and single-page brain teasers to pull the reader into advanced concepts in classical mechanics, quantum theory, and relativity.

Liouville dynamical system

In classical mechanics, Euler's three-body problem describes the motion of a particle in a plane under the influence of two fixed centers, each of which attract the particle with an inverse-square force such as Newtonian gravity or Coulomb's law.

Maupertuis' principle

In classical mechanics, Maupertuis' principle (named after Pierre Louis Maupertuis), is that the path followed by a physical system is the one of least length (with a suitable interpretation of path and length).

Theory of Dynamic Interactions

Dynamics is the part of classical mechanics that describes the evolution in time of a physical system in relation to the causes that provoke the changes of physical state and/or movement.


see also

Algebra of physical space

David Hestenes: New Foundations for Classical Mechanics (Second Edition).