Newton’s Laws of Motion
An obstacle to reading the Principia is presuming that the Laws of Motion attributed to Newton in physics textbooks, and the concept of force in them, are the same as those in the book; they are not. This chapter provides an account of his Laws and his conception of force as his contemporaries would have understood them. It does so first by giving the historical background to them in works by Descartes, Christiaan Huygens, John Wallis, and Christopher Wren; and then by reviewing the history of Newton’s own reformulations of them not just in the sequence of manuscripts leading up to the first edition, but extending even to the second edition. In the Principia the Laws serve as the basis for deriving conclusions about forces governing the motions in our planetary system from the motions of the bodies within it “among themselves.” Crucial to their doing so are their six Corollaries, some of them initially formulated as Laws. The history of their development too is covered in parallel with that of the Laws, emphasizing their crucial role in licensing those inferences regarding forces from the observed motions.