Mistranslation of Newton’s First Law Discovered After Nearly 300 Years

scientificamerican.com

6 points·wslh··5 comments

There are people spending time trying to decipher the subtle differences of some archaic sentence. Newton's first law obviously follows from the second (acceleration is force divided by mass, so no force, no acceleration). Newton decided to list it as a separate low for unknown reasons, most likely he found the exposition clearer this way (simpler first, more complex later). In the end what mattered is that he showed the entire world how to use math to do physics. Why split hairs about the meaning of the first law, which is redundant, and not used anywhere anyway?

I agree. When we discussed it in college it was talked about (some had read the original Latin) but the consensus was that it’s two sides of the same coin; if a body only changes motion based on outside forces, then it does not have “internal braking” or something similar.

It was a kind of surprising development at the time, because everything we experience seems to stop “on its own” but if you look closer you can see the forces operating.

If you read the article and considered the argument it makes, you'd see that, in fact, it is not redundant at all. This is indeed the point of the article!

But it is redundant. I know how to do calculations in Newtonian mechanics, and I never use the first law, and nobody does. Nobody would miss a bit if Newton presented his theory as only 2 laws (his second and third), and skipped the first one. But philosophers will find ways to argue about some deep meaning and put out thousands of words about said deep meaning.

It's really toe-mato, though.

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