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This book is intended to serve as a text on dynamics for undergraduate students of engineering. The book provides in-depth discussions of the fundamentals of Newtonian mechanics, more commonly known as dynamics. Drawing on the author's extensive experience in teaching the subject of dynamics at two Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST), the book contains 498 line diagrams, 123 worked-out examples and 222 exercise problems. The answers to select exercise problems are provided at the end of the book. A wealth of detailed illustrations make the book ideally suited for both self self-study and classroom use at both introductory and secondary levels. Thus the book offers a valuable resource for both students and teachers of dynamics, addressing the main topics covered in core level courses on ‘Dynamics'for students of civil, mechanical and aerospace engineering across the globe.

This book provides an introduction to Newtonian and relativistic mechanics. Unlike other books on the topic, which generally take a'top-down'approach, it follows a novel system to show how the concepts of the'science of motion'evolved through a veritable jungle of intermediate ideas and concepts. Starting with Aristotelian philosophy, the text gradually unravels how the human mind slowly progressed towards the fundamental ideas of inertia physics. The concepts that now appear so obvious to even a high school student took great intellectuals more than a millennium to clarify. The book explores the evolution of these concepts through the history of science. After a comprehensive overview of the discovery of dynamics, it explores fundamental issues of the properties of space and time and their relation with the laws of motion. It also explores the concepts of spatio-temporal locality and fields, and offers a philosophical discussion of relative motion versus absolute motion, as well as the concept of an absolute space. Furthermore, it presents Galilean transformation and the principle of relativity, inadequacy of Galilean relativity and emergence of the spatial theory of relativity with an emphasis on physical understanding, as well as the debate over relative motion versus absolute motion and Mach's principle followed by the principle of equivalence. The natural follow-on to this section is the physical foundations of general theory of relativity. Lastly, the book ends with some new issues and possibilities regarding further modifications of the laws of motion leading to the solution of a number of fundamental issues closely connected with the characteristics of the cosmos. It is a valuable resource for undergraduate students of physics, engineering, mathematics, and related disciplines. It is also suitable for interdisciplinary coursework and introductory reading outside the classroom.