Have we been misinterpreting Isaac Newton’s 1st Law for 300 years?

One Reinterpretation of Newton’s First LawThe paper, published earlier this year, caught the attention of physicists for two reasons: first, because the paper was published in a philosophy journal (Philosophy of Science), and second, because the author, Daniel Hoek, is a philosopher of language and science. mathematics as well as being an assistant professor at the School of Liberal Arts and Humanities at Virginia Tech University in the US.

When the physics genius wrote his now-famous laws of motion on parchment in Latin in 1687, he may have expected that no one would understand them at the time, but he never imagined that a translation error would cause people in the future to accept these laws. In fact, he accepts as scientific fact a concept that he did not create.

Misunderstanding Contains Newton’s so-called “law of inertia”, according to which an object remains at rest or in uniform linear motionUnless an external force acts. However, according to Hoek, this statement that we usually memorize for ENEM may not be correct.

Reinterpreting Newtonian physics

According to the philosopher, his interest in the subject is entirely “clarifying things”, Because three centuries of mistake The work called Principia may have occurred due to a “mistranslation error” when it was translated from Latin to English in 1729. The translation leads to the belief that an object will continue to move or remain motionless unless there is an intervention. external power.

Based on this translation, numerous scientists and teachers have interpreted Newton’s first law of inertia to mean that an object will continue to move in a straight line or remain at rest unless an external force intervenes. But we all know, and Newton certainly knew better than we do, that external forces were always at work.

After all, what was the translation error in Isaac Newton’s work?

Examining the Newtonian text directly from the Latin original, Hoek realized that the paraphrase in the English work (a reinterpretation of the original text) presented an error of reformulation that was not noticed until 1999. Two scientists say the correct translation of the Latin word is quatenus It’s “that’s it”, not “unless”.

According to Hoek, replacing a proportional conjunction with a conditional conjunction makes a big difference in the principle of physics. “By putting that forgotten word [na medida] go back to your place, [aqueles estudiosos] “We have restored one of the fundamental principles of physics to its original glory,” he concluded.

The example of a spinning top given by Newton is a clear example of how the physicist understands the application of the First Law: “to objects in the real world,” Hoek emphasized.

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