Simple machine

Abstract: Archimedes (ca. 287–212 BC) was born in Syracuse, in the Greek colony of Sicily. He studied mathematics probably at the Museum in Alexandria. Archimedes made important contributions to the field of mathematics. Archimedes discovered fundamental theorems concerning the center of gravity of plane geometric shapes and solids. He is the founder of statics and of hydrostatics. Archimedes was both a great engineer and a great inventor, his machines fascinated subsequent writers, and he earned the honorary title “father of experimental science”. Archimedes systematized the design of simple machines and the study of their functions and developed a rigorous theory of levers and the kinematics of the screw. His works contain a set of concrete principles upon which mechanics could be developed as a science using mathematics and reason. His contribution separates engineering science from technology and crafts, often confused for matters arrived at empirically through a process of long evolution. His works have influenced science and engineering from the Byzantine period to the Industrial Revolution and the New Era.

Abstract: The device includes embedded virtual immobile machines (20,21,30,31), i.e. a simple machine is emulated by another hierarchically more complicated machine, with its data emulated totally by this elaborate machine. Each machine virtually having an original architecture, each machine virtually being adapted to execute a programme of emulation or dynamic compilation simulating the virtual complex architecture of its immediate superior machine. The machine language of the two virtual machines immediately lower to it, is specifically configured to allow the execution of all the operations of the superior level machine.

Abstract: The invention of the printing press had an huge impact and so had the discovery of the America’s by Columbus. The Renaissance was characterized by immense optimism. The sky seemed the limit. Da Vinci was in this sense very much a representative of his time. The theory of simple machines finally reached a satisfactory form. Scientists dreamt of universal problem solving methods.

Abstract: It is enlightening to view the history of hydrostatics in terms of the overcoming of obstacles, obstacles that can only be recognized as such in retrospect. There are three candidates for inclusion in a list of such obstacles. From Archimedes to Stevin it had been assumed that the postulates of a science needed to be sufficiently obvious and unproblematic to be granted at the outset. The need for a science to outstrip the known and uncover significant novelty had yet to be appreciated. Another obstacle was a preoccupation with weight as the natural cause of hydrostatic phenomena. Thirdly, there was an inadequate appreciation of the fact that the functioning of liquids as constraints of a mechanical system needed specification. The constraints operative in the case of simple mechanical machines, such as the rigidity of balance arms, were too obvious to warrant explicit mention and so rendered the need to specify them invisible. The path from Stevin to Newton can be read as a gradual transcendence of such barriers. The identification of the way in which liquids constrain mechanical systems by virtue of the fact that they are unable to resist deforming forces, identified and exploited by Newton, was far from obvious at the beginning of the seventeenth century and had nothing to do with weight. It required the construction of a technical concept of pressure.