It all began in a London coffee house in 1684, where Edmond Halley, Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke were discussing a problem that had been troubling them: whether the elliptical orbits of the planets could derive from a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance. Wren offered a prize to whoever could provide the proof, but none of the three could complete it. Halley then decided to go to Cambridge to consult Isaac Newton, who replied with a manuscript of barely nine pages, the De Motu Corporum in Gyrum: a text that, on its own, would already have secured him a place in the history of science. But it was only the beginning. Over the following three years Newton expanded it enormously, turning it into the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), the work that reoriented natural philosophy for generations (Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics 2014, pp. 109–110) Riferimenti bibliografici.
The work was written in a veritable creative fury, during which Newton lived almost as a recluse at Trinity College, forgetting even to eat. The publication itself was an adventure: Halley financed it out of his own pocket, after the Royal Society had exhausted its budget printing a lavish book about fish (Simonyi 2012, pp. 255–270).
Newton had a working method entirely his own. He jotted down his still-immature ideas in a notebook he called the waste book, today considered perhaps the most important autograph document of the English genius. His character, however, was anything but calm. The subsequent dispute with Leibniz over priority in the invention of infinitesimal calculus degenerated to the point that the Royal Society — presided over by Newton himself — went so far as to accuse Leibniz of plagiarism. It was a “Pyrrhic” victory: out of national pride, English mathematicians stubbornly clung to Newton’s notation, ignoring the extraordinary developments of the continental school of Leibniz (the Bernoullis, Euler). For over a century, as a result, British mathematics remained of secondary importance (Simonyi 2012, pp. 295–296).
Historical context
Edward Dolnick, in his history of the era of the Principia, describes the seventeenth century as the age in which, for the first time, humanity intuits that the universe works “like a clock”: a perfect mechanism, describable by mathematical equations and predictable with arbitrary precision. Newton is the central figure of this “mechanical universe”, which all subsequent physicists would inherit and refine, right up to the crisis of classical mechanics at the start of the twentieth century (Dolnick 2011).
Yet Newton himself was far more than a physicist. He spent more time on alchemical manuscripts and apocalyptic interpretations of the Bible than on gravitation. When John Maynard Keynes bought his unpublished manuscripts at auction in 1936, he was deeply struck and wrote the famous line that sums up this dual nature:
Quote
“Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.” — John Maynard Keynes (Simonyi 2012, ch. 1)
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Topics: Dinamica Concepts: Seconda legge di Newton
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