Who Said Nobody Read Isaac Newton? | Hacker News Reader

Who Said Nobody Read Isaac Newton?

nautil.us

38 pointsdnetesn20 comments

I don't have any numbers to back this up, but having read biographical interviews with a lot of top mathematicians and scientists I got the impression that a lot of them as students read the masterpieces of the prior giants of their fields instead of just relying on the assigned textbooks.

Yes, these days Goldstein and Lanczos might be more apposite

I have a similar impression as you but I also found this quote illuminating:

"I never read the Pricipia Mathematica; almost no one has. You know it's not really traditional in Physics to go back and read the original papers of the great people before us. I'll confess I've never read Einstein's original papers on Relativity even though I've written a textbook on Relativity. In Physics the idea is it's the ideas matter, not their original presentation."

"Newton's original presentation of this stuff in the Principia - number one, it was in Latin (laughs). It took a while for it to be translated into English and number two, he was apparently afraid of using all of the new mathematical techniques he invented. So he tried very hard to only use existing mathematical techniques so people would believe him, so people would accept it right away.

"Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who is a great 20th century astrophysicist, actually wrote a version of the Principia Mathematica for the common reader. If you ever want to know what Newton was actually up to in the in his great masterwork the Principia I would advise not buying either the original Latin or English but buying Chandrasekhar's explanation of what was going on."

- Sean Carroll The Biggest Ideas in The Universe pt 2 @15:55 (youtube)

I checked out Newton’s Principia in graduate school. It’s incomprehensible because it heavily uses geometric arguments that basically no one uses these days. It’s hard stuff and looks nothing like modern calculus. I think it was L’Hospital’s book that actually looks very similar to modern-day calculus.

Leibniz’ work, from what little I’ve seen is a bit more readable, mainly because he was concerned with the conceptual-ness of it all.

Feynman, for a challenge, decided to do things the old-school geometric way, and he reported it was “damn hard”.

In contrast, Einstein on (special) relativity is excellent. I haven't revisited them since my undergrad days, but I remember being surprised by just how clear and direct the original papers were. Much easier to understand than many modern attempts! The terminology is a bit outdated in places (such as, if I'm remembering right, what you call the mass term γ m₀), but that's not hard to deal with.

Yea, Einstein’s papers and a lot of those early 20th century physics papers are surprisingly quite readable, even for a moderate layman such as myself. Because of this, I must say I find Carroll’s claim that he’s never read one of Einstein’s relativity papers a bit dubious.

Dirac’s paper on magnetic monopoles contains a rather beautiful and general introduction on progress in physics. I highly recommend it.

http://users.physik.fu-berlin.de/~kleinert/files/dirac1931.p...

This makes me wonder how important or useful rigorous / axiomatic arguments for intuitively true “facts” are. As far as applications are concerned, it seems like the physicist’s math (what Feynman calls Babylonian math as opposed to the axiomatic Greek math) works well enough, while rigorization often trails by decades or centuries (as in the case of calculus).

After getting my degree in Philosophy everyone would always ask me about Plato and Socrates... but, at the time, I had not read anything about either of them - my studies were focussed on logic and philosophy of the mind and cognition. At the time I felt silly admitting that, but I have since read a lot of antique philosophy and the majority if it is the same - a bunch of babbling with a few sprinklings of ingenious ideas. If you want to comprehend the immense ideas from great historical philosophers you are much better off reading primers or summaries with the high-points than reading the entire original texts.

That could be true with other fields too, I remember reading that amongst serious economics students there is the practice of reading Adam Smith to this day.

Interesting and pleasant to read.

I find it inspiring that some people today (but more a couple of generations ago) still learn geometry from (usually translations of) Euclid’s Elements. I just love the idea that people still study math from a book more than 2,000 years old.

At St. John's College, their mathematics textbooks are Euclid and Ptolemy, in the original. (They also read Plato, Homer, and Herodotus.)

They also use Principia for physics, but in English. Slackers.

Ah, yes. I’ve had colleagues who went to this unique college.

I found his work on gravity (I think it was the Principia but I’m not 100%) to be a difficult read and did not finish it. It did not seem to cover every point he made comprehensively and I had to fill in some gaps as I went. Some of his terminology was prone to having multiple meanings and the intended one wasn’t always immediately apparent. It still was fun in a nerdy way to have given it a shot. It is possible I was simply not in the right headspace for it and the fault is my own

I read Principia. I could follow the proofs through about 3/4ths of it. It really is tricky.

I had an easier time of it as I had read (several times) Euclids elements. So, the geometric proofs weren’t off-putting. Nevertheless, Principia is a difficult book to follow towards the end. At the end of the day, all he’s doing is providing a geometric proof as to why an inverse squared force will (must) produce an elliptical orbit. But, damn, he takes a winding path to get there, resorting to several new concepts along the way.

I remember I wanted to read Principia in my first year as a Physics student. Never got my hands on it but got my hands on other old physics books and I think it a bad idea to study on those.

The new ideas are usually not presented in the clearest way. They often are shown from the point of view of the author, who is a genius and has his own way of seeing things.

Better to study from people that have digested them, discussed them with peers and have a point of view on things that has become the standard in the scientific community

> Four centuries from now the historians of science would be examining terabytes of Facebook and Twitter records to try to understand whether or not anyone actually read this monumental work.

With Twitter it should be easy, but I think most of the contents of Facebook will be (or is already) lost, especially groups. And you can't acquire these data easily.

Even I had a copy of the Principia (translated to English) but when I opened the book and realized that Newton did everything with geometry and algebra, foregoing the calculus he and Leibnitz developed, I lost interest in the exercise.

So I believe the numbers of those who have the book and those who have read it are quite different.

Yes, but isn't it clever and beautiful that he could do all that without resorting to calculus?

I'm thinking of making an attempt at reading it precisely to try to appreciate his geometric reasoning.

Also in my time in highschool they used a physics text book which for some reason didn't use calculus at all, and as I remember they had to use a few neat tricks to present the topics in that manner without much dilution.

Not kidding, but ever thought Newton looks like a vampire? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton

He famously had a thing for crimson the last decade of his life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com