After a terrible experience of professional and personal ridicule at the hands of Robert Hooke, this book could very easily have never been published. The cost to human scientific understanding would have been catastrophic and we have not only Isaac Newton to thank for its presence. After a tragic experience of humiliation when Hooke claimed to have been the mastermind behind the discovery of the laws governing planetary motion, Newton was wary. Edmund Halley, best known to us for his namesake comet, rifled through his papers, and among his other contributions to science he convinced his friend Newton to publish his greatest work, and one of science’s greatest treasures. That book is this, Newton's Principia; The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. In these pages are the original inspired calculations that allow humanity to understand how one of the chief physical forces we encounter every day works.
Isaac Newton’s forces which act without a specific medium to work through were a new concept, defying the previously dominant idea of all objects existing within a physical ‘ether’. This insight changed how people thought about and studied physics, leading directly to later scientific breakthroughs.
In an age of polymaths, Newton was no exception, he was a student of philosophy in his youth and attempted to provide the same logical underpinning to his scientific work. He even sought a way to square his intellectual convictions with his theological beliefs, which were deep rooted and remained with him all his life.
