Quotes from Joseph Mazur

After the death of Archimedes in 212 BCE, the topic of motion was effectively abandoned; it did not resurface for another 1,400 years, when Gerard of Brussels revived the mathematical works of Euclid and Archimedes and came very close to defining speed as a ratio of distance to time.

Time dilation, inconstancy of mass, and special relativity suggest that motion is indeed illusory.

And our understanding of that motion remains fundamentally paradoxical.

But no matter how finely calibrated our clocks are, they are always measuring something discrete—an interval, a repeating signal, a duration between events. This is the heart of the problem: We measure time as a duration and think of motion as continuous. The best definition of motion we have is intricately tangled between the discrete and continuous impressions of time and space.

It is through Galileo that the connection between math and the physical world became solidified.