The English teach mechanics as an experimental science; on the continent it is always expounded as more or less a deductive and a priori science. The English are right, that goes without saying; but how could the other method have been persisted in so long? Why have the continental savants who have sought to get out of the ruts of their predecessors been usually unable to free themselves completely?
On the other hand, if the principles of mechanics are only of experimental origin, are they not therefore only approximate and provisional? Might not new experiments some day lead us to modify or even to abandon them?
Such are the questions which naturally obtrude themselves, and the difficulty of solution comes principally from the fact that the treatises on mechanics do not clearly distinguish between what is experiment, what is mathematical reasoning, what is convention, what is hypothesis.
That is not all:
1º There is no absolute space and we can conceive only of relative motions; yet usually the mechanical facts are enunciated as if there were an absolute space to which to refer them.
2º There is no absolute time; to say two durations are equal is an assertion which has by itself no meaning and which can acquire one only by convention.
3º Not only have we no direct intuition of the equality of two durations, but we have not even direct intuition of the simultaneity of two events occurring in different places: this I have explained in an article entitled La mesure du temps.[3]
4º Finally, our Euclidean geometry is itself only a sort of convention of language; mechanical facts might be enunciated with reference to a non-Euclidean space which would be a guide less convenient than, but just as legitimate as, our ordinary space; the enunciation would thus become much more complicated, but it would remain possible.
Thus absolute space, absolute time, geometry itself, are not conditions which impose themselves on mechanics; all these things are no more antecedent to mechanics than the French language is logically antecedent to the verities one expresses in French.
We might try to enunciate the fundamental laws of mechanics in a language independent of all these conventions; we should thus without doubt get a better idea of what these laws are in themselves; this is what M. Andrade has attempted to do, at least in part, in his Leçons de mécanique physique.