Introduction

According to A. R. Hall, the idea that nature is governed by laws does not appear to have existed in the ancient Greek, Roman or Far Eastern traditions of science. Hall suggests that the idea arose due to a “peculiar interaction between the religious, philosophic and legalistic ideas of the medieval European world”. There were probably other sources of the idea too. There were, for example, the influence of Euclid's geometry and Archimedes' statics in the medieval period in Europe, and the attempt that was then made to apply geometrical methods to the study of mechanics. These ancient works must have suggested to the medievals, as geometry had suggested to the ancient Greeks, that knowledge is structured. Moreover, the successes that were achieved in the early medieval period in solving problems of mechanical equilibrium, making use of such principles as the law of the lever, the principles of moments and virtual work, would certainly have added substance to the idea that nature is governed by laws.

Whatever may have been the origin of the concept of a law of nature, it is certainly true that the laws of nature were conceived from medieval times as general principles governing the kinds of motions that can be observed (kinematics), and the kinds of equilibrium states that can exist (statics). The modern concept of a law of nature is not so very different in conception, although it is no longer focused on laws of motion and equilibrium.