Related papers: The Reception of Newton's Principia
The manuscripts that presumably contained Newton's early development of the fundamental concepts that led to his Principia have been lost. A plausible reconstruction of this development is presened based on Newton's exchange of letters with…
In this article, we review the main results of Volume I of Newton's Principia which relates Kepler's law of planets and universal gravitation. In order to clarify the reasoning of Newton, elementary and simple proofs are given to inspire…
Newton's deduction of the inverse square law from Kepler's ellipse and area laws together with his "superb theorem" on the gravitation attraction of spherically symmetric bodies, are the major steps leading to the discovery of the law of…
Newton seems to have stated a quantitative relationship between the position of a body in relative space and the position of the body in absolute space in the first scholium of his Principia. We show that if this suspected relationship is…
Gravity plays an important part in the experiments and discoveries of the modern world. But how was it discovered? Surely Newton and Einstein were not the only people to observe it and account for it. It had been a long path before the full…
Newton's basic ideas developed and evolved throughout his career and changed in sometimes surprisingly profound ways. In this paper I propose an outline of the evolution of Newton's conceptual framework by following the development of his…
We re-evaluate the great Leibniz-Newton calculus debate, exactly three hundred years after it culminated, in 1712. We reflect upon the concept of invention, and to what extent there were indeed two independent inventors of this new…
The first three sections of this article contain a broad brush summary of the profound changes in the notion of time in fundamental physics that were brought about by three revolutions: the foundations of mechanics distilled by Newton in…
The aim of this short note is to realize that the main reason for non-mechanistic explanation of Newton's gravitational attraction, is explicitly encapsulated in his famous General Scholium of the second Edition of Principia Mathematica…
Newton's Principia is famous for its investigations of the inverse square force law for gravity. But in this book Newton also did something that remained little-known until fairly recently. He figured out what kind of central force exerted…
Newton's First Law of Motion is typically understood to govern only the motion of force-free bodies. This paper argues on textual and conceptual grounds that it is in fact a stronger, more general principle. The First Law limits the extent…
Application of Newton's ideas from "Principia" gives many new results in mechanics. Here we explore the question ``What form of extra force will maintain the magnitude of a vector constant of the motion while changing its direction?''
Starting from first principles and general assumptions Newton's law of gravitation is shown to arise naturally and unavoidably in a theory in which space is emergent through a holographic scenario. Gravity is explained as an entropic force…
During the past 25 years there has been a controversy regarding the adequacy of Newton's proof of Prop. 1 in Book 1 of the {\it Principia}. This proposition is of central importance because its proof of Kepler's area law allowed Newton to…
We consider the little-known anthropic argument of Fontenelle dealing with the nature of cometary orbits, given a year before the publication of Newton's Principia. This is particularly interesting in view of the rapid development of the…
A brief outline of the history of the discrepancies within Newtonian mechanics at the end of the nineteenth century is given. The framework of general relativity is described briefly and the famous 'tests' of general relativity are…
We created and analyzed a citation history of papers covering measurements of Newtons constant of gravity from 1686 to 2016. Interest concerning the true value of the gravitational constant was most intense in the late 90s to early 2000s…
Scalar fields have had a long and controversial life in gravity theories, having progressed through many deaths and resurrections. The first scientific gravity theory, Newton's, was that of a scalar potential field, so it was natural for…
There is a section in Chandrashekar's ''Newton's Principia for the Common Reader '', (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995) in which he claims to find a small error in the Principia. . However we believe that there is a mistake of interpretation…
This article is an attempt for a new vision of the basics of Physics, and of Relativity, in particular. A new generalized principle of inertia is proposed, as an universal principle, based on universality of the conservation laws, not…