De sidste tre år af sit liv skrev Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894) en bog med titlen: "Prinzipien der Mechanik in neuem Zusammenhange dargestellt". Heri præsenterer han et nyt fundament for mekanikken. Fra et fysisk synspunkt er fundamentet nyt fordi det ikke opererer med kræfter eller energi som fundamentale størrelser. Matematisk set er det nyt fordi det formuleres i termer af en riemannsk geometri på konfigurationsrummet. Endelig indeholder bogen en indflydelsesrig filosofisk indledning hvori Hertz forklarer fysiske teorier som mentale billeder af den ydre virkelighed.

Jesper Lützen har netop udgivet bogen
J. Lützen, Mechanistic Images in Geometric Form. Oxford University Press 2005

OBS The lecture will be given in English: Mathematics and Physics. A Forceless Geometric Image of Nature: Heinrich Hertz's Principles of Mechanics.

Her er Jespers engelske resumé:

Mathematics is often described as a formal construction of the human mind whose
applicability to nature is unreasonable. This may be a philosophically tenable position.
However, from a historical point of view it striking that many mathematical disciplines
have been developed in an attempt to understand the world arround us, in particular in
connection to physics. As an example, I shall tell the story of how non-Euclidean and
Riemannian Geometry was developped as a means to understand physical space, and how they
were put forward as a qualitative frame for understanding physics and a quantitative
formalism for mechanics. In particular I shal explain how Lipschitz and Darboux geometrized
Hamiltonian mechanics and how Hertz gave mechanics a new foundation formulated in terms of
what he called geometry of systems of points.