ABSTRACT
The Ancient Greek scientists distinguished between forces and matter. Chemists and physicists can investigate matter by firing particles with known properties into an object and measuring what comes out as a result of the interactions or collisions. It is often helpful to consider energy propagating as waves and being emitted from or absorbed by matter as particles. The effects resulting from interaction of radiation with matter can be subatomic, atomic, molecular or macroscopic. It is informative to approach Fourier transformation by means of the ‘model’ used by Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier himself in the early nineteenth century. Both elasticity and Hooke’s law behaviour can be related back to the energy well model of the chemical bond. An ‘elastic material’ has properties that are ‘ideal’ or ‘limiting’, a model material with associated graphical or numerical models yielding the elastic quantities.
