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."
Re:Something Tells Me... (Score:3, Interesting)
How, how, how? (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't Panic (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Since no one can find the link (Score:5, Interesting)
You'd be surprised at how well old books hold up. Even with printing they were still something of a luxury item, so they were generally printed on first rate paper and covered in leather. Those are durable materials; paper only has a bad reputation because so much recently made paper has a high acid content and degrades over time. Acid free paper, though, can last a very long time indeed. To keep a book like that in decent shape you don't have to take extraordinary precautions; you just have to protect it from abuse. My grandmother has an early printing of Principia (I'm not sure if it's a first edition, but IIRC it was printed during Newton's lifetime) and the only reason I wasn't able to read it is because I don't know Latin.
Re:It's ok... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's ok... (Score:2, Interesting)
Not Rumors, reality! (Score:1, Interesting)
[virginia.edu]
http://astsun.astro.virginia.edu/~jh8h/Foundati
Newton delayed publishing his results in part because he was forced to invent calculus in order to work out the results for the gravitational attraction of two extended bodies.
He toyed with the idea that the interaction between the earth & the apple can be treated as the interaction between two point particles. To prove this he had to invent a formalism to add up the contribution to the interaction of different pieces of the earth at varying distances from the apple -- (integral) calculus
Edward Tufte has a copy (Score:2, Interesting)
What's very interesting about this book is that the printers of the day decided to take Newton's nice illustrations and print them on a new embossing press. However, the pages had to ben run through the plain type press first, then the embosser. Four hundred years ago, this was the bleeding edge of technology and his illustrations wouldn't line up with the text.
So instead they printed the first 80 pages or so of pure text with footnotes, and at the end of the book added a section of large fold-out pages for the embossed diagrams. In addition to having to learn calculus while reading the book, looking up each diagram in an appendix must've made for some maddening reading material!
Mr. Tufte's point was that people who create data displays shouldn't let anyone screw with it. If they did it to Newton, they'll do it to anyone.
By the way, the colophon [dictionary.com] includes the printer's name in color (the only place color is used in the book), but doesn't even have Newton's name on it!
Anyway, that's a little info about the book.
Leibniz's good life and the best worlds (Score:5, Interesting)
He didn't get credit for the Calculus as readily, but it's not like he was Baruch Spinoza or William Blake (or David Hume for that matter). The man was a philosopher to royalty. The calculus was only one of his great philosophical achievements and that was noted in his time.
Incidentally, Leibniz's argument which Voltaire ridicules is kinda neat. God is all knowing, all powerful, and all loving. Because he is all knowing, he knows all the possible worlds he could have made. Because he's all poweful, he could make any worlds he knows. And because he's all-loving, he would only make the best of all the possible worlds for us of those that he knows (all of them) and can make (all of them).
So this is the best of all possible worlds.
"The Great Scientist Isaac Newton" (Score:3, Interesting)
To illustrate his views, he introduced a quotation of Newton's by saying something like, "As the Great Scientist Isaac Newton once said,
I was depressed. One would hope that anyone could speak of Isaac Newton without any further introduction, but clearly, this Congresscreature felt compelled to tell us that he was the "the Great Scientist". Otherwise, he ran the risk that his audience wouldn't know who in the world he was talking about.
Why isn't there more interest in this story, you ask? Well, because quite a few people haven't the slightest clue who Newton is or what the Principia is all about. Not unless you mention "the Great Scientist".
Re:It's ok... (Score:3, Interesting)
Noël Antoine Pluche (1688-1761), the author of a highly popular work, Le Spectacle de la Nature (1732), took Leibnitz's ideas and ran with them, and ran, and ran, and ran.
Re:Impossible God (Score:3, Interesting)
i.e. can God make a pie so big that even He couldn't eat it?
Reagrdless of the answer, you're left with an non-omnipotent god, which goes against the omnipotent monotheistic ideal.
Many philosophers have spent a lot of tiem rationalizing this out. Otehres have spent a lot of time using this to prove that God doesn't exist.
Polytheisms don't fall victim to this, since rarely do they ever have or need an all-powerful god-figure. Gods/goddesses with specific domains don't need to be all-powerful to get their jobs done. Of course, polytheism has other theological problems.
Theological philsophy is interesting to study. Brain-hurting sometimes, but fun.