English

Rethinking Newton's $\textit{Principia}$

History and Philosophy of Physics 2016-09-21 v1

Abstract

It is widely accepted that the notion of an inertial frame is central to Newtonian mechanics and that the correct space-time structure underlying Newton’s\text{Newton's} methods in Principia\textit{Principia} is neo-Newtonian or Galilean space-time. I argue to the contrary that inertial frames are not needed in Newton’s\text{Newton's} theory of motion, and that the right space-time structure for Newton’s\text{Newton's} Principia\textit{Principia} requires the notion of parallelism of spatial directions at different times and nothing more.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1609.06130,
  title  = {Rethinking Newton's $\textit{Principia}$},
  author = {Simon Saunders},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.06130},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

25 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-22T15:55:18.153Z