A subtle mistranslation of Isaac Newton’s first law of motion that flew under the radar for three centuries is giving new insight into what the pioneering natural philosopher was thinking when he laid the foundations of classical mechanics.
Throughout the centuries, many philosophers of science have interpreted this phrasing to be about bodies that don’t have any forces acting upon them, says Daniel Hoek, a philosopher at Virginia Tech. For example, in 1965 Newton scholar Brian Ellis paraphrased him as saying, “Every body not subject to the action of forces continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line.
This difference might seem rather academic—after all, Newton’s theories have been superseded by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. But Einstein built upon Newton, says Robert DiSalle, a historian of the philosophy of physics at Western University in Ontario. And people have used misinterpretations of Newton’s first law to argue that Einstein’s and Newton’s theories have fundamental philosophical disagreements, DiSalle says.
Newton’s further writings make it quite clear he meant his first law to refer to all bodies, not just theoretical force-free ones, says George Smith, a philosopher at Tufts University and an expert in Newton’s writings. “The whole point of the first law is to infer the existence of the force,” Smith says.
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