Newton's "Principia" stolen 439
Silverleaf writes "O2 have a story on the theft of Isaac Newton's revolutionary "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica" from a Russian museum. For the non-physicists among you, Newton first published his famed three laws of motion and his law of universal gravitation in "Principia" in 1687. I'm surprised this theft hasn't attracted more attention in the mainstream media, since "Principia" is generally considered the most important scientific works in history."
link broken.. (Score:2, Informative)
http://reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=huma
Working links (Score:3, Informative)
Google news has some more links. [google.com]
Google Cache (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Moscow Times (Score:1, Informative)
The Moscow times mentions [themoscowtimes.com] the theft as well (near the bottom of the page). Not nearly as much publicity as it deserves though.
Library link (Score:5, Informative)
Since no one can find the link (Score:5, Informative)
ST PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) - Thieves have stolen Newton's "apple" from a Russian museum -- the celebrated book in which the 17th century English physicist formulated his eponymous law on gravity which revolutionized science.
Posing as readers, the thieves stole a rare first edition of Isaac Newton's "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica" from the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, a library official told Reuters Sunday.
"The loss was discovered straight away when the reading room was closing on November 6 and it had not been returned by the readers who had requested it," the official said.
The theft was reported to police Friday.
Newton's "Principia" (or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), first published in 1687, is considered to be one of the most important single works in the history of modern science.
In "Principia" Newton formulates the three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation.
Legend has it that the young Newton was reading under an apple tree when he was struck on the head by a falling fruit, an innocuous event which provided the inspiration for his theories on gravity and secured him a place in history.
His new laws helped him to explain a range of phenomena, including the motion of planets, moons and comets within the solar system, the behavior of Earth's tides, the procession of the equinoxes and irregularities in the moon's orbit.
The library official said the stolen book was usually kept in the archives and only given out to readers for work in the library's reading room.
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
They didn't steal the only copy (Score:5, Informative)
It wasn't even kept under tight security. They let people read it in the reading room.
Re:It's ok... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's ok... (Score:5, Informative)
Broken Link? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's ok... (Score:5, Informative)
Newton vs Leibniz [uh.edu]
Re:It's ok... (Score:4, Informative)
There's an obvious reason why he did this: none of his readers could be expected to know calculus. It had, after all, just been invented, or was still in the process of being invented. If he wanted people to understand the concepts, he either had to teach them the math or figure out a way of presenting it convincingly without the reader needing to know calculus. Neither one is an easy prospect. I haven't read Principia myself, but I remember a physics prof mentioning that in some cases he deliberately avoided using calculus because he thought that his demonstrations would be more likely to convince people if they didn't use all that new fangled math, and it wound up being vastly more complicated as a result.
Re:It's ok... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:For crying out loud (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It's ok... (Score:4, Informative)
That would be more funny if it made sense (Score:3, Informative)
Still, sure, you can learn all about the application of the math without knowing the theoretical underpinnings all the way back to geometric first principles, but it's much more intellectually rewarding to trace them. And it's necessary in order to say that an equation is "proved" mathematically. Theories do get non-Euclidean sometimes, but you can't really appreciate that unless you know the Euclidean things themselves work.
Re:It's ok... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I'm not surprised (Score:2, Informative)
The reason this story hasn't attracted more media attention is that the book wasn't an original. It was a rare first edition, of which there are still 200 left, with 70 in the U.S. alone. See here [bbc.co.uk].
If a rare "first print" of the Mona Lisa were stolen, yet there were still more than 250 left in the world (not to mention the original), the media would barely even mention it.
Same story, another link. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Impossible God (Score:1, Informative)
Semantically void statements (such as "Why can't God do what cannot be done?") do not constitute valid arguments against omnipotence. Just because you can express a logically ridiculous statement in English doesn't mean that anyone needs to pay attention to it. "A rock so heavy that God can't lift it" (to use the canonical example) has no more semantic meaning than "colorless green ideas". God's inability to create either is no argument against Him.
Similarly, omniscient does not mean "knows what cannot be known". It means "knows all (possible) things". Something truly unknowable would not violate God's omniscience, since it would not be something which could be known.
So, while there are perfectly reasonable arguments against God's omnipotence or omniscience, this type of approach is just too simplistic. And too linked to imperfect human language (which allows the formulation of meaningless statements).