Mistranslating Newton’s Latin has massive implications
Tom KirkmanIndependent Project Manager
Words and properly defining words are a *really big deal* to me.
This article is facinating.
Misdefining and mistranslating Newton’s words carries massive implications.
(I was required to take 4 years of Latin in high school. One appreciates the implications of wrongly translating important words.)
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“… Writing in Latin, Newton outlined three universal principles describing how the motion of objects is governed in our Universe, which have been translated, transcribed, discussed and debated at length.
But according to a philosopher of language and mathematics, we might have been interpreting Newton’s precise wording of his first law of motion slightly wrong all along.
Virginia Tech philosopher Daniel Hoek wanted to “set the record straight” after discovering what he describes as a “clumsy mistranslation” in the original 1729 English translation of Newton’s Latin Principia.
Based on this translation, countless academics and teachers have since interpreted Newton’s first law of inertia to mean an object will continue moving in a straight line or remain at rest
》unless《
an outside force intervenes.
It’s a description that works well until you appreciate external forces are constantly at work, something Newton would have surely have considered in his wording.
Revisiting the archives, Hoek realized this common paraphrasing featured a misinterpretation that flew under the radar until 1999, when two scholars picked up on the translation of one Latin word that had been overlooked: quatenus, which means
●●● 》》”insofar”《《
not “unless”.
To Hoek, this makes all the difference.
Rather than describing how an object maintains its momentum if no forces are impressed on it, Hoek says the new reading shows Newton meant that every change in a body’s momentum – every jolt, dip, swerve, and spurt – is due to external forces.
“By putting that one forgotten word [insofar] back in place, [those scholars] restored one of the fundamental principles of physics to its original splendor,” Hoek writes in a blog post about his paper.
However, that all-important correction never caught on. Even now it might struggle to gain traction against the weight of centuries of repetition.
“Some find my reading too wild and unconventional to take seriously,” Hoek remarks. “Others think that it is so obviously correct that it is barely worth arguing for.”
… If we take the prevailing translation, of objects traveling in straight lines until a force compels them otherwise, then it raises the question:
●●●》why would Newton write a law about bodies free of external forces when there is no such thing in our Universe; when gravity and friction are ever-present? …”