Magnificent Principia
Exploring Isaac Newton's Masterpiece
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- USD 17.99
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- USD 17.99
Descripción editorial
Will help you appreciate and understand the significance of Isaac Newton's masterpiece--what many regard as the greatest scientific contribution of all time.Despite its dazzling reputation, Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or simply the Principia, remains a mystery for many people. Few of even the most intellectually curious readers, including professional scientists and mathematicians, have actually looked in the Principia or appreciated its contents.Mathematician Colin Pask seeks to remedy this deficit with this accessible guided tour through Newton's masterpiece. Using the final edition of the Principia, Pask clearly demonstrates how it sets out Newton's (and now our) approach to science, how the framework of classical mechanics is established, how terrestrial phenomena like the tides and projectile motion are explained, and how we can understand the dynamics of the solar system and the paths of comets. He also includes scene-setting chapters about Newton himself and scientific developments in his time, as well as chapters about the reception and influence of the Principia up to the present day.Now in paperback with a new preface, this lucidly written work makes Newton's landmark achievement comprehensible to lay readers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pask (Mathematics for the Frightened) offers an insightful and expansive look into Isaac Newton's complex and illuminating 1687 publication on classical mechanics, Philosophi Naturalis Principia Mathematica, aka the Principia. The emeritus math professor (at the University of New South Wales in Canberra, Australia) begins with a review of Newton's life and the 17th-century science scene. Copernicus's heliocentric theory and Galileo's observations had recently overturned ancient Greek and Islamic cosmological models that posited Earth as "the center of the universe," and Kepler's laws of planetary motion demonstrated that the planets moved in ellipses, not perfect circles. Newton drew on the work of his predecessors and contemporaries, as well as his own experimentation and brilliant intuitions, and after years of secretive work, the intense, enigmatic, and mercurial thinker reluctantly published the Principia at the urging of astronomer and fellow Royal Society member Edmond Halley, who also funded its printing. Newton wrote very much in the style of the ancient Greeks to explain how gravity affects motion on Earth and in the heavens while simultaneously defining the differential calculus that would become an invaluable tool for the centuries of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians that would follow. Breaking the Principia down into easily digestible portions and suffusing his narrative with modern insights, Pask reveals the genius that built modern physics.
