Principia

Principia, book about physics by Isaac Newton, the fundamental work for the whole of modern science. Published in 1687, the Principia lays out Newton’s three laws of motion (the basic principles of modern physics), which resulted in the formulation of the law of universal gravitation. The Principia was the culmination of the movement that had begun with Copernicus and Galileo—the first scientific synthesis based on the application of mathematics to nature in every detail.

In August 1684 Newton was visited by the British astronomer Edmond Halley, who was troubled by the problem of orbital dynamics. Upon learning that Newton had solved the problem, he extracted Newton’s promise to send the demonstration. Three months later he received a short tract entitled De Motu (“On Motion”). Already Newton was at work improving and expanding it. In two and a half years the tract De Motu grew into Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

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Significantly, De Motu did not state the law of universal gravitation. For that matter, even though it was a treatise on planetary dynamics, it did not contain any of the three Newtonian laws of motion. Only when revising De Motu did Newton embrace the principle of inertia (the first law) and arrive at the second law of motion. The second law, the force law, proved to be a precise quantitative statement of the action of the forces between bodies that had become the central members of his system of nature. By quantifying the concept of force, the second law completed the exact quantitative mechanics that has been the paradigm of natural science ever since.

The quantitative mechanics of the Principia is not to be confused with the mechanical philosophy. The latter was a philosophy of nature that attempted to explain natural phenomena by means of imagined mechanisms among invisible particles of matter. The mechanics of the Principia was an exact quantitative description of the motions of visible bodies. It rested on Newton’s three laws of motion: (1) that a body remains in its state of rest unless it is compelled to change that state by a force impressed on it; (2) that the change of motion (the change of velocity times the mass of the body) is proportional to the force impressed; and (3) that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The analysis of circular motion in terms of these laws yielded a formula of the quantitative measure, in terms of a body’s velocity and mass, of the centripetal force necessary to divert a body from its rectilinear path into a given circle. When Newton substituted this formula into Kepler’s third law, he found that the centripetal force holding the planets in their given orbits about the Sun must decrease with the square of the planets’ distances from the Sun. Because the satellites of Jupiter also obey Kepler’s third law, an inverse square centripetal force must also attract them to the centre of their orbits. Newton was able to show that a similar relation holds between Earth and its Moon. The distance of the Moon is approximately 60 times the radius of Earth. Newton compared the distance by which the Moon, in its orbit of known size, is diverted from a tangential path in one second with the distance that a body at the surface of Earth falls from rest in one second. When the latter distance proved to be 3,600 (60 × 60) times as great as the former, he concluded that one and the same force, governed by a single quantitative law, is operative in all three cases, and from the correlation of the Moon’s orbit with the measured acceleration of gravity on the surface of Earth, he applied the ancient Latin word gravitas (literally, “heaviness” or “weight”) to it. The law of universal gravitation, which he also confirmed from such further phenomena as the tides and the orbits of comets, states that every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centres.

Newton also first published the calculus in Book I of the Principia. He introduced in 11 introductory lemmas his calculus of first and last ratios, a geometric theory of limits that provided the mathematical basis of his dynamics.