display all the ideas for this combination of texts
3 ideas
| 17008 | You have discovered that elliptical orbits result just from gravitation and planetary movement [Newton, by Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: You have made the astonishing discovery that Kepler's ellipses result simply from the conception of attraction or gravitation and passage in a planet. | |
| From: report of Isaac Newton (Principia Mathematica [1687]) by Gottfried Leibniz - Letter to Newton 1693.03.07 | |
| A reaction: I quote this to show that Newton made 'an astonishing discovery' of a connection in nature, and did not merely produce an equation which described a pattern of behaviour. The simple equation is the proof of the connection. |
| 17010 | We have given up substantial forms, and now aim for mathematical laws [Newton] |
| Full Idea: The moderns - rejecting substantial forms and occult qualities - have undertaken to reduce the phenomena of nature to mathematical laws. | |
| From: Isaac Newton (Principia Mathematica [1687], Preface) | |
| A reaction: This is the simplest statement of the apparent anti-Aristotelian revolution in the seventeenth century. |
| 17023 | I am not saying gravity is essential to bodies [Newton] |
| Full Idea: I am by no means asserting that gravity is essential to bodies. | |
| From: Isaac Newton (Principia Mathematica [1687], Bk 3 Rule 3) | |
| A reaction: Notice that in Idea 17009 he does not rule out gravity being essential to bodies. This is Newton's intellectual modesty (for which he is not famous). |