Discovery and Invention - The Newtonian Revolution in Systems Technology.pdf
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1、JOURNAL OFGUIDANCE, CONTROL,ANDDYNAMICS Vol. 26, No. 6, NovemberDecember 2003 Discovery and Invention: The Newtonian Revolution in Systems Technology RudolfKalman Swiss Federal Institute of Technology,CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland Revolutions? T HIS year we are celebratingthe dawn of ? ight: powered,c
2、on- trolled, manned ?ight. This was a revolution,but a very slow revolution. It began many millennia ago, with Daedalus, the ? rst great engineer in the history of engineering.1And it was not the only technological revolution. Besides wanting to ? y like a bird, man also fancied swimming like a ? sh
3、 (underwater), rising to the stars (as in the imagination of poets), and seeing/hearing the past (movies/television/sound recording). About 150 years ago, things started to liven up, and we have had three or four simultaneous and interrelatedtechnologicalrevolutions.They were foreseenand romanticize
4、dbyJulesVerne(18281905),thefatheroftechnology- ? ction, favorite writer of my youth, and also that of my engineer father.Vernesvisionscametobetheprehistoryofwhatfollowed,as inRobur,theConqueror(1886)(? yingmachine/helicopter),Twenty ThousandLeaguesundertheSeas(1870)(privatesubmarine),From the Earth
5、to the Moon (1865) and Around the Moon (1870)(space tourism),andCastleintheCarpathians(1892)(recordingandrecre- ation of opera in stereo sound and sight). Like (probably) all contributorsto our centennial celebration,I am in a poor position to say anything personal about the dawn of ? ight, having b
6、een born exactly half a century too late. My S.B. degree,MassachusettsInstituteofTechnology(MIT),was in1953. Muchthesameholdsfortheotherdevelopmentsjustmentioned.My admirationfor the courageand initiativeof the pioneersof ? ight is, so to say, boundless, but it is purely intellectual, not emotional.
7、 I wasnt presentat the creation. If I am to make an emotional/intellectual contribution to this celebration,I shouldlookfarthera? eldandbringbackintomemory a differentrevolution.The Newtonianrevolution.A revolutionthat, in my days, has profoundly affected all of the other revolutions mentioned befor
8、e; and much more: a revolution that is likely to be the most permanent of any of them. This is a revolution I have always liked. I have contributedto it. It is not a revolutionthat Verne had anticipated.I would exclude here The 500 Millions of the Begum (1879) (in which a private weapon of mass dest
9、ruction turns out to be useless because of in- adequate mathematical modeling in the planning stage) as well as TopsyTurvy(1889)(inwhichanattempttorepositiontheaxisofthe Earthforprivatepro?t? zzlesbecauseofmathematicalerror).These stories did involve mathematics but had a very negative message. My m
10、essage is totally positive. All revolutionsare not “created equal.” One may shudder at the memoryoftheviolenceoftheFrenchRevolution(1789)nottospeak of the brutality of the Russian Revolution (1917), but one should notoverlookthe bloodlessJapaneseRevolution(Meiji Restoration, 1867)which was farmore i
11、mportanttotheworldandisstilla major Received 15 August 2003; accepted for publication 16 August 2003. Copyright c 2003 by RudolfKalman. Publishedby the American Institute ofAeronauticsandAstronautics, Inc., with permission. Copiesofthispaper may be made for personal or internal use, on condition tha
12、t the copier pay the $10.00per-copy fee to the CopyrightClearance Center, Inc., 222 Rose- wood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923;includethe code 0731-5090/03 $10.00in correspondence with the CCC. Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Member, National Academy of Sciences, NationalAcademy of Eng
13、ineering;Foreign Member of the French, Hungarian,and Russian Scienti? c Academies. political force today. The Newtonian revolutionseems to me to be similar. Asregardstheconnectiontechnology/revolution,letmecitehere the admirable work of Lucio Russo.2He recountsthe rapid expan- sion of technologyand
14、the sciencesin the Hellenisticera, two mil- lennia ago, a revolution, which to him is the “forgotten one.” His thesis is that this revolution,by the year zero, ran into so many of economic,educational,political,social,moral,and intellectual(but mainly political)obstaclesthat it had to prematurelydie
15、. This sce- nario makes both of us terribly nervous because it brings to mind the situationwe ? nd in the year 2003. My expositionwill emphasizeintellectualhistory. What Newton Did To the modern media consumer,Isaac Newton (16431727) ap- pears as a disagreeable person. For example, reminiscent of Bi
16、ll Gates, he thought he should be paid for intellectual work, even if of no immediate practical value. Never mind, he became very famous, even among the little educated. Because he did some- thing absolutely unexpected, unimaginable, ununderstandable but true. He made it believable that he (we) can
17、unravel the se- crets of the real world we live in by using nothing more than: Mathematics! Nobody understood this, of course, except, probably, the great man himself. (We shall return to this point later.) And they all be- lieved it! The poet Alexander Pope (16881744) wrote (see Ref. 3), in 1735, “
18、Nature and Natures laws lay hid in night; God said: Let Newton be! and all was light. This is the usualstorywe read in textbookswrittenfor educating physicists and engineers. And it does Newton a great and well- deservedhonor. Butitmissesthebigideas.Whatarecalled“Newtonslawsofmo- tion” in the textbo
19、okswere actuallydiscoveredin the courseof the researchesofGalileo(15641642),whodiedaboutninemonthsbe- fore Newton was, prematurely,born. Newton never claimed credit for what Galileo did. Newtons laws of motion are in essence a repackaging, in precise mathematical language, of Galileos dis- coveryof
20、inertia.This job was preprogrammedby Galileo himself. Everyoneknows that he kepton repeating,“the Laws of Natureare a book written in mathematicalcharacters.” Newton wrote his magnum opus (in Latin, completed 1687), PhilosophiaeNaturalisPrincipiaMathematica, entirelywithin the Galilean/mathematical
21、framework (note the last word in the title), but his immediate inspiration was different. As is well known, around 16821684, Newton started a line of “experiments,” with pencil and paper, using nothing more than Euclidean geometry (Greek mathematics), all of which he knew exceedingly well, and witho
22、ut any help from new physical measurements, special apparatus, or a government-?nanced laboratory. His sole aim in this research was to understand the implications of the work of Kepler (15711630), those famous three laws of Kepler (1609, 1619), which ? rst gave an accuratebehavioraldescriptionof pl
23、an- etary motion. The results of this purely mathematical investigation were recordedin Newtons manuscript,stillextant,“De Motu”(see Ref. 4). 833 834KALMAN These experimentsled Newton to the amazing discovery,no less amazingnowthanit had seemedatthe time, that Keplerianmotion, themotionofaplanetarou
24、ndasunconformingtoKeplerslaws,was a direct,deductive,rigorous,and uniqueconsequenceof a centrally acting force inversely proportional to the square of the distance (inverse-squarelaw).Everybodywould ofcourseidentifythisforce with the veryreal and verymysteriousforceof gravity.Conversely, postulating
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