Zeno and Galileo

Zeno and Galileo is effectively a study in the ontology of movement. It is based on the physical research of movement in Greco-Roman civilization and Western-European civilization but it touches the movement in their arts and literature also. The basic difference between those two civilizations is their approach to the causality principle: “Every object has its cause” – think people in the Greco-Roman world but “Every change of the state of the object has its cause” – think Westerners. This leads to the world of the static balance of Greco-Roman civilization and to the world of the dynamic balance of the West. It is noticed also that the world of static balance is the characteristic of all pristine civilizations (Egyptian Chinese and Indian for instance) and that Western civilization is the only civilization which produced the World of dynamical balance. But generally the book is engaged in commenting on several Galileo’s real and thought experiments and comparing them to Zeno’s paradoxes and Archimedes’ trial (not experiment!) with lenses. There is also a study of Quantum Mechanics and Theory of Relativity from the point of view of two variants of the causality principle.