How to do mechanics without knowing it

A paper on the history of mechanics in the Middle Ages, co-authored by Henrik Lagerlund and Sylvain Roudaut, has been published in Aeon. The paper, which arose out of an ongoing edition of some of Blasius of Parma’s Questions of the Physics having to do with mechanical problems, presents the intricate history of this discipline during the Middle Ages and the evolution of its status.

One of the intriguing aspects of this story is that, despite laying the foundations of modern physics, and having envisioned quite varied practical applications of theoretical mechanics, most medieval thinkers named this discipline the ‘science of weights’ and did not suspect until the 16th century that they were doing what is called ‘mechanics’.