Elasticity: Cartesian fields of dilatation

T hroughout history there has always been a struggle in the human mind between the discrete and the continuous. This difference in viewpoint climaxed in the 17th century because of a fundamental conflict in the cosmologies of Descartes and Newton. The 17th century was arguably the century of scientific genius: Kepler, Napier, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Fermat, Pascal, Huygens, Hooke, Boyle, Leeuwenhoek, Newton, and Leibniz.