Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NOTES 1. (See p. 28.) The law of inertia was afterwards formulated by Newton in the following way: Corpus omne perseverare in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi uniformiter in directum nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur statum ilium mutare. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Amstaelo- dami, 1714, Tom. I, p. 12 (Lex. I of the Axiomata sive leges motus ); cf. pp. 2, 358. [The first edition of the Principia was published in London in 1687, the second edition at Cambridge in 1713, the third in London in 1726, and an English translation, in two volumes, by Andrew Motte, in London, 1729 (American editions, New York, 1848 and 1850, one vol.). Full bibliographical information as to the various editions and translations of Newton’s works is given in George J. Gray’s book, A Bibliography of the Works of Sir Isaac Newton, 2d ed, Cambridge, 1907.] Since Newton, this law, which was with Galileo a mere remark, has attained the dignity and intangible- ness of a papal dictum. Perhaps the best way to enunciate it is: Every body keeps its direction and velocity as long as they are not altered by outer forces. Now, I remarked many years ago that there is in this law a great indefiniteness; for which body it is, with respect to which the direction and velocity of the body in motion is determined, is not stated. I first drew attention to this indefiniteness, to a series of paradoxes which can be deduced from it, and to the solution of the difficulty, in my course of lectures
Ueber einige Hauptfragen der Physik in the summer of 1868, before an audience of about forty persons. I referred regularly to the same subject in the years following, but my investigation was not printed for reasons stated in the next note. Now, a short while ago, C. Neumann1 discussed this …