I’m currently re-reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. An old book from 2003. For instance, the author celebrates that Pluto was finally recognized as a planet by the IAU. So, there’s this interesting story about scientific startups in the 17th century.
Everyone knows from school that Isaac Newton is the father of classical mechanics and gravity concepts, and authored a fundamental work that underpins all subsequent physical science: “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,” or simply “Principia.”
There was also Halley—the one after whom the comet was named, and then there was Hooke, who discovered the cell (and Hooke’s law of elasticity and loads of other stuff).
So in 1684, Halley, discussing the problem of planetary orbits with Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren, asked, “What force makes the planets move in elliptical orbits?” Hooke claimed it was a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance, but he could not prove it strictly. Halley went to Cambridge to ask Newton directly—and to his astonishment, Newton said that he had already proven it. Moreover, he promised to send a detailed account. Actually, he got a bit carried away and instead of simply answering the question, he wrote three volumes of “Principia” (and deliberately wrote it in a complicated way to discourage the uninitiated).
As the work on “Principia” was nearly complete, Newton and Hooke disputed over who first discovered the inverse-square law of force, and Newton refused to release the key third volume that made the first two volumes sensible. Thanks only to tense diplomacy and the most generous doses of flattery from Halley, the fussy professor eventually agreed to release the final volume. Without Halley’s interest and prodding, Newton probably would not have formalized his discoveries into a cohesive work.
The Royal Society had promised to publish the work but then declined, citing financial difficulties. The year before, the society had funded a costly flop called “History of Fishes,” and suspected that a book on mathematical principles would hardly stir market excitement.
Halley, whose financial situation was modest, paid for the publication from his own pocket. Newton, as was his habit, contributed nothing. To make matters worse, just then, Halley had taken a position as the society’s clerk, and was informed that the society could no longer pay him the promised salary of 50 pounds a year.
Instead, they decided to pay him with copies of the History of Fishes. The society handed him 50 copies of the same History of Fishes” (apparently intended for fireplace use).
About several hundred copies of “Principia” were released—a rather large print run for such an expensive book, yet the publication aroused no interest from the reading public. The book sold very poorly, and the publishing did not pay off at all. Even in 1739, 53 years after the publication, an inventory check found the Society still had 126 copies left, and these were being sold at huge discounts, given away, or virtually given away for free.
Ironically, one of the most influential texts in the history of humankind was considered virtually a commercial failure at the time.
And it’s funny that since its publication in 1687, there was a calculation error in the text that wasn’t noticed until 1987, 300 years later, by a student, Robert Garisto, a senior at the University of Chicago.
In sentence eight (the book used such numbering) Newton tried to confirm his theory by calculating the mass, the force of gravity at the surface, and the density of known planets. To calculate mass, he needed to know the angle between the line from the center of the Earth to the Sun and the line from a point on the Earth’s surface to the Sun.
Modern measurements give this value as about 8.8 arcseconds (one second is 1/3600 of a degree). Newton thought it was 10.5 seconds, but mysteriously used 11 seconds in the actual equation. This error was discovered by Garisto when he was redoing the calculations as part of a regular class assignment.
This Robert Garisto is now an editor of Physical Review Letters. He recently made headlines a second time when his journal published a scientific paper with 5,154 authors 🙂
