physiognomic:

the outward appearance of anything, taken as offering some insight into its character

 

Goethe (“Nature has no system….”):

the full quote:

                  “Natural system — a contradiction in terms. Nature has no system; she has, she is life and its progress from an unknown center toward an                        unknowable goal. Scientific research is therefore endless, whether one proceed analytically into minutiae or follow the trail as a whole, in                          all its breadth and height.”

taken from Goethe’s essay  “Problems”, in the  journal  Morphological Notebooks, 1822

 

computer:

a person who determines by calculation or who reckons

 

Democritus (shock and counter shock):

see above page 386

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Aristotle (the entelechy):

concept connected with Aristotle’s distinction between matter & form (or the potential & the actual).  He analysed each thing into the elements of which it is composed, and the form which makes it what it is. The matter is not yet the real thing; it needs a certain form to complete it.  Matter and form are never separated & can only be distinguished.  In a living organism the sheer matter of the organism can be distinguished from a certain form or function or inner activity, without which it would not be a living organism at all; this vital function Aristotle (in his De anima-On the Soul) called “the entelechy” of the living organism.  For a man it is rational activity that makes a man a man distinguished from a brute animal.

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Occamists (14th-Century idea of force impetus): * see EndNote<A>

philosophical & theological teachings developed by William of Ockham (1285–1347) which had widespread currency in the 14th century.  It questioned Aristotelian physics & metaphysics and insisted the only reality was via individuals, universals exist only in the mind, without correspondence with reality, signs that symbolize a multiplicity of individuals.  Ockham was a pioneer of nominalism, & his followers used the Nominalist method to separate theology from Aristotelian foundations.  The impetus theory is credited to Buridan, another 14th century scholastic & nominalist.

 

quantum-theory of radiation:

quantum mechanics provides a description of atoms & subatomic particles.  Spengler would have been aware of the old quantum theory (1900–1925), a theory never complete & only an approximation of modern quantum mechanics.  This older theory began with Max Planck's solution (1900) to the black-body radiation problem, and Einstein's 1905 paper examining the correspondence between energy & frequency & which explained the photoelectric effect.  He (& later Debye), applied quantum principles to the motion of atoms, explaining the specific heat anomaly.  In 1913 Bohr identified the correspondence principle & formulated a model of the hydrogen atom explaining the line spectrum.  In 1915-16 Sommerfeld extended the Bohr theory making it a powerful tool of atomic research; the new & more general Bohr–Sommerfeld theory described the atom in terms of 2 quantum numbers (Bohr had originally used only 1).  This work allowed the orbits of the electron to be ellipses instead of circles & introduced concept of quantum degeneracy. 

 

Mechanics:

branch of physics that deals with the action of forces on bodies and with motion, comprised of kinetics, statics & kinematics.