[.ca] Wittgenstein Flies A Kite (ISBN 0131499971)

History of Ideas of Models and Physically Similar Systems:
As author, I'd like to provide the synopsis/abstract of my book "Wittgenstein Flies A Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World" as it appears on my own webpage: "Abstract: Wittgenstein told friends on many occasions that he came to see how things in the world can be represented in language by thinking about scale models, and that it occurred while he was a soldier, in the autumn of 1914. This book is the result of investigating the idea that perhaps he meant experimental engineering scale models. It is well known that Wittgenstein had been an aeronautical engineer before going to Cambridge to study philosophy with Bertrand Russell in 1911. Why only in 1914, then, did this insight occur? It so happens that 1914 was the year that the basis of the method of experimental engineering scale models was formally set out and presented, by a philosophically-minded physicist, as a matter of a purely logical principle about any symbolic system that is used to represent physical relationships. In fact, a whole array of discussions about similarity arose in 1913-1914, in physics, biology, and chemistry. The book lays out this previously untold story in the history of ideas, presents a new reading of Wittgenstein's philosophical work (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) and explains how many heretofore puzzling claims in it click into a coherent account on this new reading. " However, I don't think you need to have any interest in Wittgenstein to appreciate the history of ideas in the book. I am not aware of another book that gives an account of the historical background to, and a critical-historical review of, the idea of physically similar systems ranging from Galileo to Rayleigh and beyond, including physics, mathematics, biology, and chemistry. The book also contains an English translation of Boltzmann's 1894 lecture on Aeronautics as an appendix.