Monday, September 18, 2023
Parchment or Paper?
Clare Watson, "We've Been Misreading a Major Law of Physics For The Past 300 Years," ScienceAlert (14 September 2023):
Hat tip: Eric Thomson, who did all the work.
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When Isaac Newton inscribed onto parchment his now-famed laws of motion in 1687, he could have only hoped we'd be discussing them three centuries later.Newton did on occasion make notes on parchment — see e.g. Richard S. Westfall, The Life of Isaac Newton (1993; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 49. But the passage in question was written on paper, as can be seen at https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-03958/86.
Writing in Latin, Newton outlined three universal principles describing how the motion of objects is governed in our Universe, which have been translated, transcribed, discussed and debated at length.
But according to a philosopher of language and mathematics, we might have been interpreting Newton's precise wording of his first law of motion slightly wrong all along.
Virginia Tech philosopher Daniel Hoek wanted to "set the record straight" after discovering what he describes as a "clumsy mistranslation" in the original 1729 English translation of Newton's Latin Principia.
Hat tip: Eric Thomson, who did all the work.
Labels: typographical and other errors
