Newton’s Daunting Masterpiece Had a Surprisingly Wide Audience, Historians Find | Hacker News Reader

Newton’s Daunting Masterpiece Had a Surprisingly Wide Audience, Historians Find

nytimes.com

45 pointspseudolus13 comments

This is a book census, a technique in History of the Book/Bibliography where historians try and track down every existing copy of an edition of a book and then attempt to reconstruct the “provenance” - the ownership history of a particular copy. It’s one of the best tools for getting at the “reception” of a particular work.

The most complete and well-known example of this study to date was Owen Gingrich’s census of copies of Copernicus’ de revolutionibus: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Book_Nobody_Read.ht...

The main findings of the Principia study according to the NYT:

> An earlier census of the book, published in 1953, identified 189 copies worldwide. But a new survey by two scholars has found nearly 200 more — 386 copies in all, including ones far beyond England in Budapest; Oslo; Prague; Zagreb, Croatia; the Vatican; and Gdansk, Poland.

Is this “surprisingly” wide? All a matter of expectation, I suppose. The original scholarly article is open access so you can decide for yourself: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00033790.2020.1...

Quite a few of these copies would have been behind the iron curtain in 1953 so hardly surprising they weren’t identified.

For anyone interested in Principia, I would recommend S Chandrashekhar( The Nobel laureate in Physics), 'Principia for the Common Reader'.

Chandrashekar's book is a wonderful labor of love by a brilliant Physicist, but it's really a translation of the Principia into modern physics and mathematics, with little attention paid to historical context.

To understand the book (and Newton) on their own terms, you have to go to the historians of science. I'd recommend pairing Chandrashekar with I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman's translation of The Principia, I. Bernard Cohen's, A Guide to Newton’s Principia, Robert Westfall's biography Never at Rest, and the more recent synthesis of Newton scholarship, The Cambridge Companion to Newton.

Oh, and if you really want to understand Newton and his view of the universe, you have to dip into his alchemy and theology. Historians have known for a long time that Newton spent far more time on alchemy and theology than he did on mathematics/physics, but it still comes as a surprise to most people not in the field. (Although, if you've read Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle, you probably have some idea.) A ton of work has been done on these areas in the last 30 years. See for example, The Chymistry of Isaac Newton project (https://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/project/about.do), and The Newton Project (http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/contexts/CNTX00001)

I thought Chandrashekhar do try to unravel and explain the geometric reasoning that Newton used, of course also explaining how it might be explained with the apparatus of modern mathematics.

> ...if you've read Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle, you probably have some idea.

I looked up The Baroque Cycle on GoodReads and the reviews weren’t very positive. One reviewer compared it to the London phone directory in terms of number of characters vs plot complexity.

Is this series worth reading? I have found HN gives better book reviews than goodreads in general - want to hear what you all have to say.

I enjoyed it. It’s long and undoubtedly overstuffed but the set pieces (Stephenson write fantastic action scenes) and the ideas are great fun.

I found it interesting at times. I don't know how historically accurate were its portrayals of events and personalities though.

I thought it was great, a wild journey through the 17th century. But maybe not to everyone’s taste - massive sprawling scope and there is indeed a huge cast of characters; it’s packed with various (mostly super interesting!) digressions into things like coinage, banking, alchemy, court politics. It will take you a while to get through.

If you’re not sure, you could read his Cryptonomicon first, and if you like that, and are good with even more so, and in the 17th century, then Baroque Cycle is probably your thing.

Newton's arguments in Principia are written in the language of Euclidean geometry and Latin. Two subjects pretty much every European scholar would have studied.

IIRC one of young Voltaire's French lady friends was studying the Principia, and it was considered a trendy thing to do.

> The discovery suggests that Principia had a stronger impact on Enlightenment science than previous research suggested.

Gee, I was always under the assumption it had a tremendous impact on Enlightenment science.

Are you thinking of Émilie du Châtelet? (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89milie_du_Ch%C3%A2telet) I don’t think she counts as a “trendy” student of the Principia. She translated the whole thing into French and wrote her own commentary on it. Certainly understood it at a much deeper mathematical level than Voltaire himself did!

That said, it was certainly a trendy topic of conversation in Enlightenment salons, even if few people actually read it for themselves.

Didn't mean to imply she was not serious, rather that studying the Principia was a thing in those days, and rather the Surprisingly part of the title of the OP is problematic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com