Timeline for Can anyone find Newton's calculation error in Principia, Book III, Proposition XIX?
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10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 6 at 10:15 | comment | added | Georg Essl | When Newton did his calculations, no computers existed. Calculations were all manual and prone to errors at every step. A different take is that Newton's calculation is actually quite accurate to about an 0.2% error, not bad for manual computation. | |
| Jun 6 at 5:06 | history | bumped | CommunityBot | This question has answers that may be good or bad; the system has marked it active so that they can be reviewed. | |
| May 7 at 4:21 | answer | added | bob1 | timeline score: 1 | |
| Nov 13, 2020 at 13:42 | comment | added | mmanu F | Is there an online version of volume II, 3rd edition? | |
| Nov 13, 2020 at 12:55 | comment | added | mmanu F | OK! I have the (annotated) 2nd ed. (cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-ADV-B-00039-00002/851) & it's enlightening! The printed version has an earth radius of 19,695,539 and a (correct) computed velocity of 1436.223. But he changed the radius by hand to 19,622,659 & the velocity (still correct) to 1430.085. That hints to the answer: at the time of the 2nd ed. he's not decided which value to choose for the radius! Note that none of these are the value used in the translation of the 3rd ed. Note also that the circumference given page 848 IS the one used in the translated editions ... | |
| Nov 13, 2020 at 10:17 | comment | added | mmanu F | Someone knows where to find the 2nd & 3rd editions online ? | |
| Nov 13, 2020 at 10:10 | comment | added | mmanu F | yes, I knew that story (from Garisto himself on twitter). Until now, I only checked, the english (Motte) & french (du Châtelet) translated version. But now that you're asking, I looked into the latin version (I found the annotated first edition here cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-ADV-B-00039-00001/1 and the one typed in the wikisource (not sure of the edition) la.wikisource.org/wiki/…) : the calculation is not there, the whole first part of Prop.XIX, Prob.III is missing (there Prop.XIX is only Prob.II)... interesting... | |
| Nov 12, 2020 at 20:53 | comment | added | Conifold | This is not the only calculational error in book III, Garisto found another one in Proposition VIII. There Newton calculated the relative mass of the Earth for 11" parallax, but then changed the parallax to 10.5" in the third edition, while forgetting to change the relative mass accordingly (which he did calculate in the manuscript). Is this error present in all editions? | |
| Nov 12, 2020 at 14:57 | review | First posts | |||
| Nov 12, 2020 at 15:47 | |||||
| Nov 12, 2020 at 14:52 | history | asked | mmanu F | CC BY-SA 4.0 |