according to Steidel ; and his 60-year-old developments and notation are as fresh and recognizable as those of Thomson (in 1981) and the others.
Steidel's two prefaces (to his two editions) indicate that he is somewhat iconoclastic toward his chosen field. In his second edition preface, written only ten years after the United States landed people on the moon, Steidel decided it was time to write-off both the space age, first, and also random vibration as a subtopic worthy of much attention: "Random vibration has receded in importance, as could have been predicted. The only real source . . . is the rocket motor, so applications . . . are inevitably tied to the space program. When the space program declined, our interest in random vibration declined." (It was 1979!) Earlier, in his first-edition preface, he was motivated in part, he said, by his sour disposition toward other writers' preoccupation with vibration damping (energy dissipation) and especially viscous damping: "Damping is most accepted as being viscous, but . . . there are only two common examples . . ., one is laminar flow of a fluid through a slot and the other is laminar flow through an orifice. All other forms of damping are something else, and why a text should run headlong into a discussion of viscous damping in its first chapter has been particularly bewildering to me." Bringing a bit of attitude to mechanical vibration seems to ease the trek through the tedium.
The study of mechanical vibration is a subset of Engineering Dynamics, which is the study of bodies in motion and the forces that cause motion; vibration is a rapid, oscillatory motion of an otherwise rigid body. Steidel tells us that the work that initiated the physics of vibration was that of Galileo, first to describe the motion of an "isochronous" pendulum, plus his crowning achievement in experimental physics that proved the law of falling bodies, which in turn formed directly the basis of...