6 Friction-Induced Vibration and Self-Organization
personal experience as a source of knowledge, rather than studying the leg-
acy of the scholars of the past.
Many natural scientists were also inuenced by mysticism. Even Isaac
Newton himself put a lot of effort into the research of what would be called
today occult studies, which constitutes a signicant part of his written leg-
acy. However, in the seventeenth century it was realized that empirical sci-
ence has a method of its own, which is quite different from that of magic
or mystics with their individual visionary “experiences.” In mechanics, the
works by Galileo constituted this turn to empirical science, as well as those
by Isaac Newton (1643–1727), Gottfried Leibnitz (1643–1716), Robert ...