Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;
God said "Let Newton be" and all was light.
If your neighborhood is like ours, then, it started with Halloween which began about Labor Day: lights; people lit up their yards and houses with displays of icons and arrays of sparkles. As soon as Halloween passed, Christmas was launched. I believe that this is a reaction to the continuing Covid crisis. People are resisting despair and fighting back against both biological and social malaise with symbols of hope and good cheer.
 |
| Around our neighborhood; the unicorn is snorting shifting colors. |
In Newton’s time, it was the Great Plague of 1665. That was followed by the great London fire of 1666. When the plague struck, Cambridge University was closed and Newton went home to Woolsthorpe. There, isolated with his own thoughts, he expanded his work in mathematics, optics, and gravitation.
 |
| Two Newtonian reflectors: my first Celestron Equatorial 130-mm and my current Besser 208-mm. Reflectors have no chromatic aberration and are easy to make very large. |
We can only wonder if forty years from now we will have time travel and warp drive (perhaps the same phenomenon) because some genius was isolated by Covid-19.
 |
| We accept today that Leibniz and Newton developed the calculus independently. We generally use the Leibniz notation though Newton's can be a convenient shorthand. |
The American Numismatic Association granted a George Heath Literary Award (2002) to a feature article that I wrote about Sir Isaac Newton’s 30-year career at the Royal Mint, published in November 2001. Historian David Berlinski called that time “uninteresting” ending his biography with the publication of the Principia.
Not many people read Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica today in any language and surely not in Latin. I have two editions, one translated by I. Bernard Cohen whose work I already knew from reading ancient sources when writing about numismatics.
Newton’s ideas are easy to explain today, especially using algebra and the Leibniz notation for calculus. The proofs in the Principia are—and could only have been—delivered via geometry. We do not know it so well today. Richard P. Feynman intended to develop and present his own proofs to a class as a treat to relieve the stress of up-coming semester final examinations. He could not do it. He did not know enough geometry.
 |
| The book is the Principia, opened to the page proving Kepler's laws and central force motion. |
The core of that work is Newton’s mathematical proof that Kepler’s laws of motion are required by logic and determined by the nature of central force motion as measured for timekeeping, navigation, and astronomy. They are necessary factual truths.
Previously on Necessary Facts
Newton versus the Counterfeiter
Measuring Your Universe: Alan Hirshfeld’s Astronomy Activity Manual
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.