Mechanization refers to the use of powered machinery to help a human operator in some task. The use of hand powered tools is not an example of mechanization.
The term is most often used in industry. The addition of powered machine tools, such as the steam poweredlathe dramatically reduced the amount of time needed to carry out various tasks, and improves productivity. Today very little construction of any sort is carried out with hand tools.
The term is also used in the military. Here it refers to the use of vehicles, notably APCs, to move troops that would otherwise have marched into combat. Mechanization dramatically improved the mobility of infantry, and today what little infantry is not mechanized is airborne.
Mechanics was studied by a number of ancient Greek scientists, most notably Aristotle, whose ideas dominated the subject until the late Middle Ages, and Archimedes, who made several contributions and whose approach was quite modern compared to other ancient scientists.
In 1905, Albert Einstein showed that Newton’smechanics was an approximation, valid for cases involving speeds much less than the speed of light; for very great speeds the relativistic mechanics of his theory of relativity was required.
In the quantummechanics developed during the 1920s as part of the quantumtheory, the motions of very tiny particles, such as the electrons in an atom, were explained using the fact that both matter and energy have a dual nature—sometimes behaving like particles and other times behaving like waves.
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