In a sense, this is a book for the beginner in mechanics, but in another sense, it is not. From the time people make their first movements, crude ideas on force, mass, and motion take shape in the mind. This body of ideas might be reduced to some order in high school, but not necessarily. There is rather an accumulation of miscellaneous facts bearing on mechanics, some mathematical and some experimental, until a state is reached where the student is in danger of being repelled by the subject, as a chaotic jumble which is neither mathematics nor physics. This book is intended primarily for students at this stage. The authors' ambition is to reveal mechanics as an orderly self-contained subject. It stands out as a model of clarity among all the theories of deductive science. Towards the end of the book, advanced subjects such as Lagrange's equations and the special theory of relativity are included.
