Force
Sir Isaac Newton described the motion of all objects using the concepts of inertia and force, and in doing so he found they obey certain conservation laws. In 1687, Newton published his thesis "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica". In this work Newton set out three laws of motion that to this day are the way forces are described in physics.
History of physics
In 1739, Leonhard Euler solved the ordinary differential equation for a forced harmonic oscillator and noticed the resonance phenomenon. In 1742, Colin Maclaurin discovered his uniformly rotating self-gravitating spheroids. In 1742, Benjamin Robins published his "New Principles in Gunnery", establishing the science of aerodynamics. British work, carried on by mathematicians such as Taylor and Maclaurin, fell behind Continental developments as the century progressed. Meanwhile, work flourished at scientific academies on the Continent, led by such mathematicians as Bernoulli, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, and Legendre. In 1743, Jean le Rond d'Alembert published his "Traite de Dynamique", in which he introduced the concept of generalized forces for accelerating systems and systems with constraints, and applied the new idea of virtual work to solve dynamical problem, now known as D'Alembert's principle, as a rival to Newton's second law of motion. In 1747, Pierre Louis Maupertuis applied minimum principles to mechanics. In 1759, Euler solved the partial differential equation for the vibration of a rectangular drum. In 1764, Euler examined the partial differential equation for the vibration of a circular drum and found one of the Bessel function solutions. In 1776, John Smeaton published a paper on experiments relating power, work, momentum and kinetic energy, and supporting the conservation of energy. In 1788, Joseph Louis Lagrange presented Lagrange's equations of motion in "Mécanique Analytique", in which the whole of mechanics was organized around the principle of virtual work. In 1789, Antoine Lavoisier states the law of conservation of mass. The rational mechanics developed in the 18th century received a brilliant exposition in both Lagrange's 1788 work and the "Celestial Mechanics" (1799–1825) of Pierre-Simon Laplace.