Isaac Newton's book, the Principia, transformed human understanding of the forces of nature, providing a mathematical basis for the movement of planets, moons, and comets(彗星), as well as objects on Earth. Recently, a new survey has more than doubled the known number of first editions of the book, including the first ones found in Asia. Nearly 200 first editions of Principia were newly identified in the survey, bringing the total known number to 386. The volumes cover 27 countries on five continents, including Africa and Australia.
Until now, the size of the Principia's first edition had been thought to be small-around 250-based on a 1953 survey that put the number of copies at 189. That figure partly reflects a long-held idea that the book, formally titled the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, was virtually incomprehensible outside of a small circle of expert mathematicians. But the new survey suggests that the great volume, at 500 pages and written in Latin, may have been popular in many parts of the world.
Behind the pages of the Principia, in which Newton laid out his three laws of motion, is an interesting history that involves the astronomer Edmond Halley and ether great figures. Most famous today for the comet that bears his name, Halley sought Newton's input on the shape of planetary orbits, a question that Halley and his colleagues had been puzzling over. Excited by Newton's answer—an ellipse(椭圆), and even more so by a paper he later sent to show his calculations, Halley pushed Newton to write the Principia, then funded its publication and was key to promoting it.
Such a precious book of knowledge carries enormous value. "In a sense, the Principia combined all the work that was done for the previous hundred years," says Mordechai Feingold, a science historian at the California Institute of Technology. "It took Newton to put together the ideas, that Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and other scientists had put forth insofar as heavenly bodies(天体) are concerned, to realize that Earth is a planet like any other planet and there's a mutual(相互的) attraction between all those heavenly bodies. "
