[Work, momentum and fatigue in the work of Daniel Bernoulli: toward the optimization of biological fact].

Abstract

The concept of mechanical work is inherited from the concepts of potentia absoluta and men's work, both implemented in the section IX of Daniel Bernoulli's Hydrodynamica in 1738. Nonetheless, Bernoulli did not confuse these two entities: he defined a link from gender to species between the former, which is general, and the latter, which is organic. In addition, Bernoulli clearly distinguished between vis viva and potentia absoluta (or work). Their reciprocal conversions are rarely mentioned explicitly in this book, except once, in the section X of his work, from vis viva to work, and subordinated to the mediation of a machine, in a driving forces substitution problem. His attitude evolved significantly in a text in 1753, in which work and vis viva were unambiguously connected, while the concept of potentia absoluta was reduced to that of human work, and the expression itself was abandoned. It was then accepted that work can be converted into vis viva, but the opposite is true in only one case, the intra-organic one. It is the concept of fatigue, seen as an expenditure of animal spirits themselves conceived of as little tensed springs releasing vis viva, that allowed the conversion, never quantified and listed simply as a model, from vis viva to work. Thus, work may have ultimately appeared as a transitional state between two kinds of vis viva, of which the first is non-quantifiable. At the same time, the natural elements were discredited from any hint of profitable production. Only men and animals were able to work in the strict sense of the word. Nature, left to itself, does not work, according to Bernoulli. In spite of his wish to bring together rational mechanics and practical mechanics, one perceived in the work of Bernoulli the subsistence of a rarely crossed disjunction between practical and theoretical fields.