The System of the World (Illustrated)

The System of the World by Isaac Newton.

This book contains Newton's law of motion.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was an English physicist and mathematician who is widely recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time and as a key figure in the scientific revolution.

Isaac Newton's accomplishments in his career were numerous and this great work supplied the momentum for the Scientific Revolution. It has dominated physics for over 200 years. Newton made seminal contributions to optics, and he shares credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of calculus.

Amongst his contributions to the advancement of Science, Newton's laws of motion are three physical laws that, together, laid the foundation for classical mechanics. They describe the relationship between a body and the forces acting upon it, and its motion in response to those forces. His book The System of the World lays out these concepts.

Newton remains influential to today's scientists, as demonstrated by a 2005 survey of members of Britain's Royal Society (formerly headed by Newton) asking who had the greater effect on the history of science, Newton or Einstein. Royal Society scientists deemed Newton to have made the greater overall contribution. In 1999, an opinion poll of 100 of today's leading physicists voted Einstein the "greatest physicist ever;" with Newton the runner-up, while a parallel survey of rank-and-file physicists by the site PhysicsWeb gave the top spot to Newton.

Newton himself had been rather more modest of his own achievements, famously writing in a letter to Robert Hooke in February 1676:

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants

Introduction from The System of the World

It was the ancient opinion of not a few, in the earliest ages of philosophy, that the fixed stars stood immoveable in the highest parts of the world; that, under the fixed stars the planets were carried about the sun; that the earth, us one of the planets, described an annual course about the sun, while by a diurnal motion it was in the mean time revolved about its own axis; and that the sun, as the common fire which served to warm the whole, was fixed in the centre of the universe.

This was the philosophy taught of old by Philolaus, Aristarchus of Samos, Plato in his riper years, and the whole sect of the Pythagoreans; and this was the judgment of Anaximander, more ancient than any of them; and of that wise king of the Romans, Numa Pompilius, who, as a symbol of the figure of the world with the sun in the centre, erected a temple in honour of Vesta, of a round form, and ordained perpetual fire to be kept in the middle of it.

Isaac Newton Quotes

Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.
I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.
Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.
If I have done the public any service, it is due to my patient thought.
To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.
I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light.
Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.