![]() “I think it’s an interpretation that people thought up looking back,” DiSalle says. Not only did Newton not intend to make a law about imaginary force-free bodies, DiSalle says, but his contemporaries didn’t interpret him that way, either. ![]() “The paper makes it easier to see why that point of view is wrong,” DiSalle says. It says that force-free bodies move in straight lines or stay at rest, but how do you know that they’re force-free? Well, it’s because they move in straight lines or stay at rest. In particular, there have been complaints that Newton’s first law is circular. And people have used misinterpretations of Newton’s first law to argue that Einstein’s and Newton’s theories have fundamental philosophical disagreements, DiSalle says. But Einstein built upon Newton, says Robert DiSalle, a historian of the philosophy of physics at Western University in Ontario. This difference might seem rather academic-after all, Newton’s theories have been superseded by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In other words, Hoek wrote, a better paraphrase would refer to all bodies: “Every change in a body’s state of motion is due to impressed forces.” ![]() Newton’s use of the Latin for “except insofar” ( nisi quatenus) was meant not to specify that the law referred only to such bodies, he said, but to point out that motion only changes insofar as a force compels it to. In a recent paper published in the journal Philosophy of Science, Hoek argued that Newton had no intention of using the first law to refer to imaginary, force-free bodies. Why make a law about something that doesn’t exist? For example, in 1965 Newton scholar Brian Ellis paraphrased him as saying, “Every body not subject to the action of forces continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line.” But that’s a bit puzzling, Hoek says, because there are no bodies in the universe that are free of external forces acting upon them. Throughout the centuries, many philosophers of science have interpreted this phrasing to be about bodies that don’t have any forces acting upon them, says Daniel Hoek, a philosopher at Virginia Tech. Writing in Latin in his 17th-century book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Newton said, “Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by the forces impressed.” The first law of motion is often paraphrased as “objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and objects at rest tend to stay at rest.” But the history of this rather obvious-seeming axiom about inertia is complicated. A subtle mistranslation of Isaac Newton’s first law of motion that flew under the radar for three centuries is giving new insight into what the pioneering natural philosopher was thinking when he laid the foundations of classical mechanics.
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