Oresme applied his concept to the analysis of local motion where the latitudo or intensity represented the speed, the longitudo represented the time, and the area of the figure represented the distance travelled (Fig 1-II). He showed that his method of figuring the latitude of forms is applicable to the movement of a point, on condition that the time is taken as longitude and the speed as latitude; quantity is, then, the space covered in a given time. In his treatises, Oresme not only reproduced the theorem on the kinematics of uniformly accelerated motion, but also considered a thought experiment with mechanical motion in the cabin of a coming ship illustrating the relativity of mechanical movement. These achievements of Nicholas Oresme became…show more content… Geometrization of time by Nicholas Oresme and his followers was a radical departure from the interpretation of time in Greek philosophy.
Plato and Aristotle always associated time with the movement and processes of physical reality change, arguing that not only the motion is measured by time, but also time by a movement: “they are determined by each other, because time defines the movement being his “number”, and movement defines time” (Aristotle [3]). Any movement, and any process involving the change of physical reality, always have some degree of irreversibility, and this irreversibility is the ontological foundation of the “physical” time in Greek philosophy.
Aristotle believed that in time as in any continuous substance there must be some invariant – the “first measure”, the primary moment of time, the instant, which he called “now”: “From the above it is clear that in time there is something indivisible, what we call “now”. The most important characteristics of this “now” is a potential indivisibility and at the same time, the potential continuity, so that this “now” can serve as a boundary between the actually nonexistent “past” and…show more content… The basic method of describing motion by Galileo became the use of the geometrical image of time as a straight line, introduced by Nicholas Oresme. Newton, following Galileo mixed space segments, velocities and geometrical time-intervals in his kinematic diagrams. He introduced the absolute “mathematical” time with the image of a “continuous flow” in a straight line (“fluxions”). Using time-intervals as an equal to space segments in the adopted reference systems provided Newton with effectiveness and visibility of the geometrical description of the mechanical