Beschreibung
THE IMPORTANT ACTA ERUDITORUM REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPIA. There were four early reviews of the Principia: the first appeared in no. 186 of the Philosophical Transactions but, not only did Halley finance, edit, publish and distribute Principia, he also reviewed it, anonymously, in P[hilosophical] T[ransactions]. It is little more than a summery interspersed with expressions of praise . The second appeared in the Bibliothèque Universelle of March 1688, consisting of nothing more than the headings of the sections of Books I and II translated into French. There is also a summary of Book III, and an introductory paragraph … The final review was that in the Journal des sçavans, August, 1688, in which Newton s hypothesis was dismissed as arbitrary, unproven and belonging to geometry rather than mechanics . Published in June, 1688, the review in the Acta offered here is the third in sequence, and the most detailed and serious of the four reviews. It was comprehensive enough to provide many people in Europe without access to the Principia itself with a fairly full account of its contents (Gjertsen, The Newton Handbook p. 472). New evidence has recently enabled the author of this book review [in the Acta] to be identified as Christoph Pfautz (1645-1711), a professor of mathematics at the University of Leipzig . Pfautz was a logical choice to be the reviewer of the Principia. He was a professional mathematician interested in astronomy. He was also a close associate of the editor, Mencke, and was a regular reviewer of the Acta … It is evident that Pfautz is making a careful and complete paraphrase or summery or epitome (as we shall see Newton call it) of the Principia, much like an extended and detailed analytical table of contents … Following an extended summery of the many different topics explored by Newton, Pfautz reaches the conclusion of Book Two. He fully appreciates the significance of Newton s demonstration that the speed of planets in their orbits, moving more slowly in their aphelia and more swiftly in their perihelia is the opposite of what ought to happen according to the mechanical law of vortices . He apparently can find no fault with Newton s ringing conclusion that the planetary speeds in Cartesian vortices contradict the celestial phenomena, even though he does not comment on the significance of the dreadful blow that Newton has dealt to Cartesian physics. That Pfautz fully understood some of the main principles of Newton s dynamics is made clear in his discussion in Book Three of the motion of the planets. For he says that, using what he has said in the preceding books , Newton demonstrates that the forces by which the circumjovial planets, the primary planets, and the moon are continually drawn away from rectilinear motions and are kept in the orbits are the result of their gravitation toward Jupiter, the sun and the earth . It was a primary feature of Newtonian dynamics thus to explain curved or orbital motion and a continual acceleration or falling toward a center as a result of a centripetal force, which in the case of planets and satellites is the force of gravity. Thus Newton dismissed from physics the ambiguous and misleading notion of a centrifugal force. Pfautz review achieved a special importance in 1689, when Lebniz referred to it in one of the three articles published in the Acta: the Tentamen de Motuum Coelestium Causis (Essay on the Causes of the Motions of the Heavenly Bodies). In this work, Leibniz set forth an alternative explanation to Newton s (I. Bernard Cohen, The review of the first edition of Newton s Principia in the Acta Eruditorum, with notes on the other reviews in The investigation of difficult Things. Essays on Newton and the History of the Exact Sciences pp. 323-336). Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers ed43084eccb52a56da11e19ec066272c
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