Posts com a Tag ‘A Contribution to the Newtonian Scholarship: The “Jesuit Edition” of Isaac Newton’s Principia (T)’

The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in Latin), hereafter Principia, a three-volume tour de force written by Isaac Newton, and published in 1687, is the seminal work in the history of modern physics. American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate, Steven Weinberg, remarked in his 1972 work on cosmology and gravitation that “all that has happened since 1687 is a gloss on the Principia” (apud Pask, 2013, 14).

The second edition of the Principia was published in 1713, and reprinted and corrected in 1714, incorporating a more comprehensive theory of the Moon, the motions of comets, and the precession of the equinoxes, and, at the end of the whole book, the famous general scholium. The third edition of the Principia was published in 1726. Newton made some additions to the third edition, including new explanations for the resistance of fluids in “Book 2” (which resumes “Book 1”, De motu corporum, “On the motions of bodies”), as well as a more detailed explanation for the Moon’s orbit and the role of gravitation, and, in “Book 3” (De mundi systemate, “On the system of the world”), new observations of Jupiter and the comets. The first translation into English was published in 1729, by Andrew Motte, based on the 1726 third edition of the Principia. Leia Mais