The Foundations of Dynamics
Gerald J. Whitrow · Bulletin of the British Society for the History of Science · 1950
Galileo, the founder of Dynamics, regarded this discipline partly as a cosmological science. He based his Natural Philosophy on a highly mathematical interpretation of Nature which was the foundation of the modern idea of the Uniformity of Nature as contrasted with the Aristotelian distinction between the terrestrial and the celestial realms. The most important influence on Galileo's thinking was Archimedes, but whereas the latter had constructed a geometry of rest, Galileo built a geometry of motion. He introduced, at least implicitly, the revolutionary conception that uniform motion in a straight line is physically equivalent to a state of rest.