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Newton's Principia: The Central Argument
Translation, Notes, and Expanded Proofs
Third Edition, completely revised and enlarged,
with new sections added.
Notes and expanded proofs by Dana Densmore
Translations and diagrams by William H. Donahue
7" x 10", 589 pages, over 300 diagrams, index and bibliography
Publication date: October 2003.
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Newton's Principia: The Central Argument 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 in his own terms, allowing students to
reconstruct Newton's propositions authentically. It is not a commentary
or a presentation of Newton's propositions as they might appear in a modern
textbook. Rather, this guidebook unfolds what is implicit in Newton's
words as he would have filled in the steps, while completing the argument
in ways that are not anachronistic.
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Third Edition Features:
The third edition of this guide to Newton’s magnum opus has been
completely redesigned for ease of study. Newton’s text appears in
color with a distinctive antique font, while the notes and expanded proofs
are set in the highly-legible Stone Sans typeface.
In response to requests by numerous readers, this new edition has been
significantly expanded to include and discuss additional portions of the
Principia. Among these additions are:
• Notes to Newton’s Definitions and Laws of Motion
• Proofs for the Corollaries to the Laws of Motion
• Complete Scholia to the Definitions and Laws
• The Three-Body Problem
In this edition, the treatment of several propositions and lemmas has
been made more straightforward. In general, wherever readers have reported
difficulties, notes have been reworked to respond to their needs. The
result is a major revision with many improvements.
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Newton's Principia: The Central Argument presents Newton's original
text (the selections newly translated for this edition), offers notes and questions
for pondering, and then expands Newton's sketched proofs step by step. Following
his original proofs exactly eliminates the common confusions and misinterpretations
of what Newton assumed and what he proved in the course of the development of
his great work.
Densmore's painstaking reconstruction of Newton's original thought processes
makes this work a significant contribution to Newtonian scholarship.
Most works of Newtonian scholarship from his time through the present have bypassed
the difficulty of true reconstruction by translating Newton's proofs into algebra
and modern calculus. This misses the essence of Newton's masterpiece (he deliberately
chose not to use algebra or calculus) and sometimes leads to outright mistakes.
Readers and scholars who want to know what Newton really said, as opposed to
how one might prove the same things in a different way, will find the full proofs
nowhere else.
Dana Densmore discussing the distinction between inherent force and
applied force. Photo by David Trozzo.
"Densmore's commentary has a directness, an intelligence and
infectious energy that takes readers through all the difficulties to a
very satisfying accomplishment...I cannot emphasize too strongly what an
achievement it is."
--- Curtis Wilson, Editor
General History of Astronomy
"This is a wonderful book. Taking Newton in his own terms,
it insists on the full rigor of the demonstrations and does not hesitate
to point out where full rigor appears to be lacking. The flavor of the
book can be sampled in its treatment of the phenomena cited at the
beginning
of Book 3, where Densmore pauses to explain in what sense generalizations
not directly observable can be called phenomena (for example, Kepler's
third law applied to the satellites of Jupiter) and how the data for them
were collected in the late seventeenth century. ... As she says in the
Preliminaries,
'we understand Newton only in understanding why he proved things as he
did' (p. xxiv). Students are not the only ones who can profit from the
exercise."
---Richard S. Westfall, Indiana University
Author of Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac
Newton
"The stress is on encouraging students to reconstruct Newton's
proofs
in their original geometric form, rather than translating them into the
more familiar symbolic calculus. This is particularly interesting because
Newton's geometric style informs our geometric and physical intuition in
a way which is complementary to the understanding achieved via analytical
tools.
Historians of science have a great deal to learn from it. A first class
work."
---Niccolo Guicciardini
Mathematical Reviews, Issue 99
More Reviews
Foreword by Curtis Wilson
Sample pages:
Proper display may require that you open these pdf documents in Adobe Acrobat Reader: Click
here to download Acrobat PDF reader.
Dana Densmore and William H. Donahue
are independent scholars. Dana Densmore was a faculty member at St. John's College,
where she developed this guidebook for undergraduates in the St.
John's College Great Books program. William H. Donahue is translator
of Johannes Kepler's New Astronomy and Kepler's Optics, and currently is on the St. John's College faculty serving as Director of Laboratories.
Newton's Principia: The Central Argument, Translation, Notes, and Expanded Proofs
Third Edition, completely revised and enlarged,
with new sections added.
Notes and expanded proofs by Dana Densmore
Translations and diagrams by William H. Donahue
7" x 10", 589 pages, over 300 diagrams, index and bibliography
Sewn softcover, ISBN 1-888009-23-3, List price $37.95.
Order from either of the sources below:
Order this book directly from our distributor, National Book Network (NBN), toll free at (800) 462-6420. |
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Click here for other order options, shipping options, order inquiries, bulk orders, returns and more.
Clothbound with Dust Jacket, ISBN 1-888009-24-1, List price
$49.00.
Order from either of the sources below:
Order this book directly from our distributor, National Book Network (NBN), toll free at (800) 462-6420. |
|
|
Click here for other order options, shipping options, order inquiries, bulk orders, returns and more.
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Santa Fe New Mexico
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