My father showed me a comet through his binoculars after dinner when I was six. I remember seeing that ghostly wisp from another time, suspended in space, hung among the stars. Years later, as a middle school student in Florida, our librarian displayed a copy of Newton’s Principia on a stand in the library. It was laid open to pages of intriguing, complex-looking geometrical drawings, including Newton’s dramatic illustration of a comet. I flipped through it every time I passed by, amazed to discover that things I saw in the sky could be known through the language of mathematics, a fact that still endlessly inspires me.
I wrote...
Newton's Gravity: An Introductory Guide to the Mechanics of the Universe
Ever since I was a small boy obsessed with the stars, I’d read about how Newton deciphered the secrets of the universe. Yet he himself remained a cipher. So when I was given Christianson’s book as a present, I was enchanted. I place this book in the top three or four best all-time biographies I’ve ever read (and I’ve read plenty!).
Others—I recycle; this one—never. Christianson presents a vivid picture of the life, work, and relationships of this most brilliant of men. Some science biographies suffer from awkward writing, but for me, Christianson has seamlessly woven the complexities of Newton’s life and science together in rich, colorful prose. And what an interesting life it was! You will find other Newton biographies; I treasure this one.
A biography of Newton probes the scientist's reclusive personality, recreates the turbulent intellectual atmosphere of seventeenth-century Europe, and lucidly describes Newton's epoch-making discoveries in physics, optics, and astronomy
Years ago, I decided to plunge headfirst into Newton’s great and famously daunting work, the Principia, to see what I could grasp. My education is in mathematics and physics, and I thought I’d give it a go. With Dana Densmore’s book by my side, I discovered, to my surprise, that the wonder of Newton’s achievements can be known to anyone, even to those without any particular mathematical training.
If you too are curious—and you must be—please get Dana Densmore’s remarkable book! She’s a mathematician who writes beautifully—she’ll walk you through every stage of the master’s thought. It’s a beautiful book to look at and have: Donahue’s meticulous graphics and translations in colored font are fun to pore over, alongside Dana’s intelligent commentary.
Makes the great adventure of Principia available not only to modern scholars of history of science, but also to nonspecialist undergraduate students of humanities. It moves carefully from Newton's definitions and axioms through the essential propositions, as Newton himself identified them, to the establishment of universal gravitation and elliptical orbits. The guidebook unfolds what is implicit in Newton's words as he himself would have filled in the steps and completes the argument in ways that are authentic and not anachronistic, exactly following Newton's thinking rather than substituting tools of modern calculus or the formulations of modern physics. It is Newton…
Twenty years ago, while driving to my favorite lunch-hour swimming place in Hawaii, I heard the renowned physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar being interviewed on the radio about the release of his new book on Newton’s Principia.
Chandrasekhar’s goal was to present Newton’s thought and ‘mathematical craftsmanship’ in a way accessible to the modern reader. Long an admirer of Chandra and Newton, I was sold. This labor of love is the book to read if you want to know all about how Newton did it.
But in fairness, it is not really for ‘the common reader:’ its math level varies from simple to challenging. Yet there is somuch there, even if you don’t get it all. The illustrations are big and clear; his technical and historical asides are fascinating and stimulating.
Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica provides a coherent and deductive presentation of his discovery of the universal law of gravitation. It is very much more than a demonstration that 'to us it is enough that gravity really does exist and act according to the laws which we have explained and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies and the sea'. It is important to us as a model of all mathematical physics.
Representing a decade's work from a distinguished physicist, this is the first comprehensive analysis of Newton's Principia without recourse to secondary sources. Professor…
This is a delightful read about a subject I’ve been attracted to for many years: gravity. The odd fact is, while we can use Newton’s laws to determine all sorts of things that gravity can do—with sufficient precision even to guide spaceships to orbits around other planets—we still don’t really know what gravity is.
The book is an extended essay about the history of our ideas about gravity’s myths, maths, and mysteries. I especially enjoyed how Panek raises and lightly touches upon so many aspects of the question, juggling it with finesse from every angle. He covers the ground long before, up to, and past Newton’s breakthrough. I particularly liked his discussion of the problem of comets in Newton’s theory. Panek concludes with recent gravity wave detections.
"A thoughtful meditation on the mythic, cultural, philosophical and, yes, scientific implications of what happens when a wet potato or a crystal vase slips from your hand."-Billy Collins
A mind-bending exploration of gravity, the universe's greatest mystery.
What is gravity Nobody knows-and just about nobody knows that nobody knows. How something so pervasive can also be so mysterious, and how that mystery can be so wholly unrecognized outside the field of physics, is one of the greatest conundrums in modern science. But as award-winning author Richard Panek shows in this groundbreaking book, gravity is a cold case that we are…
It was good luck when I stumbled across this marvelous Newton resource at a used bookstore in Edinburgh, Scotland. I open it frequently; arranged alphabetically, the answer always seems to be there. There are so many aspects to Newton’s life, writings, andsciencethat a book like this—this book—is indispensable for anyone who spends time with the man or his ideas.
Running from “Aberration” to “Young, Thomas,” it encompasses everything in between: Newton’s family tree (under “Family”); writings on mechanics (under “Mechanics”); chronology, data, contents, and summaries of each edition of the Principia (under “Principia”); and details of every one of his published works (under “Works”). Of great use to me, too, are biographic summaries of his contemporaries (like Flamsteed, Halley, and Hooke), all concise and excellent.
My book conveys the power of simple mathematics to tell fundamental things about nature. Many people know that tides are caused by the pull of the Moon and Sun, but few can calculate their gravitational pulls on the oceans. Fewer still can use Newton’s laws–the math is easy!–to estimate a comet’s speed as it rounds the sun, find a planet’s mass from the orbit of its moon, or plan a Mars mission. The book shows how with simple tools.
Using historical examples, Newton's Gravity crosses disciplines—history, astronomy, physics, and mathematics—and explains things passed over or taken for granted elsewhere. The book’s focus is on Newton’s, rather than Einstein’s, gravity: on the beauty of classical celestial mechanics and the problems of motion.
