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S. CHANDRASEKHAR, Newton's Principia for the Common Reader. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Pp. xxiii + 595. ISBN 0-19-852675-X. £49.95 (paperback). (First published in hardback, 1995).
doi:10.1017/S0007087405337277
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-95) was one of the greatest theoretical astrophysicists of the twentieth century. A Nobel laureate in physics in 1983 for his contributions to the study of stars' evolution, he is the author of treatises well known to physicists all over the world. During his last years, Prof. Chandrasekhar developed an interest in Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The book under review originated in a series of lectures held in Chicago and Oxford in the early 1990s. Newton's Principia for the Common Reader is thus an exceptional book: the result of a great mind's efforts to unravel the often obscure masterpiece of one of the greatest geniuses of Western civilization.
Chandrasekhar analyses in detail almost all the propositions of Book 1 and Book 3 (leading to universal gravitation), and part of Book 2 (which deals with a variety of topics not directly connected with universal gravitation, such as motion in resisting media, hydrodynamics and sound waves). More specifically, Chandrasekhar comments on all of Book 1, with the exception of Sections 4 and 5, devoted to the geometry of conic sections (though the scholium at the end of Section 4 is discussed on pp. 533-4), and of Section 10, on pendulums (though its Propositions 46 and 47 are discussed on pp. 201-3). Book 2 is covered only in part: the reader will find a treatment of section 4, on air drag on a centrally attracted projectile; of Proposition 24, on pendulum experiments showing the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass; of Proposition 34 and its scholium, on the solid of least resistance (with an aside on Newton's approach to the curve of quickest descent); and of section 8, on sound propagation. Book 3 is covered in its entirety, from the 'Rules of reasoning in philosophy' up to the General Scholium, via the first basic fourteen propositions (where Newton reaches his grand conclusion regarding the existence of a universal force of gravitation) and the propositions dealing with, variously, the shape of the...