What Newton really meant

Another look at his First Law

Out of Newton's laws, his first is not only the hardest for people to remember from school but also the most mysterious. At a first glance it seems almost redundant, and you wonder why Newton put it there. In this piece Daniel Hoek examines the First Law and shows how our collective misunderstanding of it seems to have stemmed from an unfortunate mistranslation.

Newton’s First Law is a lie! That is to say, the principle that everybody calls “Newton’s First Law”, the one they tell you about in school, the one physicists and scholars have for centuries attributed to Newton –– that principle is not Newton’s First Law. It is a clumsy mistranslation of the Latin principle that Isaac Newton labelled the First Law of Motion, an eighteenth century mistake that somehow managed to fly under the radar.

But before I go into that, let me back up a little to remind you of what Newton’s First Law is supposed to say, and to tell you about the time I first knew something was up.

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Michael Malosky 27 October 2024

"How did so many experts and smart people miss this?" you ask.
Then you go on later to answer your own question:
"To be clear, I am not saying physics would have gone differently if Newton’s insofar had not been lost in translation."
Simply put, the motivation to explicate any further, to fine tune the translation into minute specificity just wasn't there. Scientific publishing is brutally functional -- either the theory works, comports to the data and makes predictions, or it doesn't.
Any obstacles or shortcomings that derived from a flawed translation would immediately emerge and face stark scrutiny. Welcome to science!
I think articles like this spring from a love of language and ideas, but have little import outside niche History of Ideas forums or publications.

James Kinney 21 January 2024

I am not sure what all the buzz is about, MoE LLM translated it perfectly and subsequently used the word "unless" in its explanation.

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User: Translate:

Corpus omne perseverare in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi uniformiter in directum, nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur statum illum mutare.

Llama: "Every body persists in its state of being at rest or moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed." This translation comes from the second law of motion stated by Sir Isaac Newton.

User: Explain in as much detail based on translation.

Llama: The given Latin text can be translated into English as follows, "Every body persists in its state of being at rest or moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed." This statement comes from the second law of motion stated originally by Sir Isaac Newton.

This principle essentially means that an object will maintain a constant velocity (which includes both speed and direction) unless acted upon by some external influence or forces, such as gravity, friction, wind resistance etc., which can alter its state of rest or uniform movement in a straight line. It's important to note here that 'velocity', unlike just speed, also considers the direction an object is moving at any given time - so if you were standing still on Earth (at rest), gravity would be acting upon your body causing it to accelerate towards the center of our planet despite no apparent movement in space.

This law forms one part of Newton's three laws that form a basis for classical mechanics, providing fundamental insights into how objects move and interact with each other under different conditions or forces applied on them. The second law quantifies this relationship between force (F), mass(m) ,and acceleration (a): F=ma where 'force equals the product of an object's mass times its acceleration'.

In summary, Newton’s Second Law states that when no net forces act upon a body it remains at rest or continues to move in uniform motion. If there is some external force applied then only will this change occur; otherwise everything would continue moving straight ahead forever until something intervenes! That's why we call them 'laws of physics', because they describe how nature works all around us - even if sometimes it might seem like magic ????‍♂️.

I hope that helps clarify things for you, but let me know if there is anything else I can
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