Newton's De Gravitatione

Newton's notions of absolute space and of absolute time did not appear abruptly in 1687 with the publication of Principia. We now have his manuscripts on gravitation, entitled De Gravitatione et Aequipondio Fluidorum (On the Gravity and Equilibrium of Fluids), presumably written when he was young, around 1670, and from this we can infer that he already had basically the same idea in this period, although the word "absolute" does not appear yet. This is quite interesting in that we can know Newton propounded his doctrine of absolute space and time in order to refute Descartes' strange theory of motion which may be named as a radical relativism (in Principia Philosophiae). Moreover, we can find many explicit statements on the nature of absolute space and time, which are often omitted in his later and published version in Principia. After a brief introduction, Newton presents the following definitions. The terms quantity, duration, and space are too well known to be susceptible of definition by other words. Def. 1. Place is a part of space which something fills evenly. Def. 2. Body is that which fills place. Def. 3. Rest is remaining in the same place. Def. 4. Motion is change of place. (Hall, A. R. and N.B. Hall, eds., Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton, Cambridge University Press, 1962, 122) Here, it is clear that for Newton (at this period), the crucial notions of quantity, of duration (of time), and of space looked already evident and secure. In Principia, of course, he became more cautious and he carefully chose the words for describing space and time. But the essential content is here stated straightforwardly. And in particular, he explicitly mentions Euclid when speaking of motions in space; that is, space is Euclidean 3-dimensional space (together with, in modern terminology, the metric characterizing it). And the essential point is that (1) space is distinct from the bodies in it, and (2) motion is determined with respect to space, not to any other bodies. And, in particular, Newton has the Cartesian notion of motion in mind, and (3) he wishes to dispose of it. He summarizes Descartes' doctrine as follows: (1) That from the truth of things only one particular motion fits each body (Principia, Part II, Art. 28, 31, 32) , which is defined as being the translation of one part of matter or of one body from the neighbourhood of those bodies that immediately touch it, and which are regarded as being at rest, to the neighbourhood of others (Principia, Part II, Art. 25; Part III, Art. 28). (2) That by a body transferred in its particular motion according to this definition may be understood not only any particle of matter, or a body composed of parts relatively at rest, but all that is transferred at once, although this may, of course, consist of many parts which have different relative motions. (Principia, Part II, Art. 25.) (3) That besides this motion particular to each body there can arise in it innumerable other motions, through participation ( or in so far as it is part of other bodies having other motions). (Principia, Part II, Art. 31.) Which however are not motions in the philosophical sense and rationally speaking (Part III, Art. 29), and according to the truth of things (Part II, Art. 25 and Part III, Art 28), but only improperly and according to common sense (Part II, Art. 24, 25, 28, 31; Part III, Art. 29). That kind of motion he seems to describe (Part II, Art II; Part III, Art.

28) as the action by which any body migrates from one place to another. (Hall and Hall 1962, 123) Even the general reader can suspect that something funny going on here. A body's motion is defined by reference to its contiguous environment, but the latter may be in any of various motions relative to something else! Thus it is rather easy for Newton to point out absurdities such as this: For he [Descartes] says that speaking properly and according to philosophical sense the Earth and the other Planets do not move, and that he who declares it to be moved because of its translation with respect to the fixed stars speaks without reason and only in the vulgar fashion (Part III, Art. 26, 27, 28, 29). Yet later he attributes to the Earth and Planets a tendency to recede from the Sun as from a center about which they are revolved, ... (Hall and Hall, 124) And a lot more follows. But at this point, a thought may occur to a charitable reader: why on earth did Descartes propose such a doctrine, which leads to many such absurdities? According to Julian Barbour (2001, 435-50), the famous incident of Galileo's condemnation by the Inquisition (1633) came in, for Descartes who was in the final stage of preparing The World (a book on cosmology, posthumously published in 1664, where Descartes's earlier theory of motion was also propounded). In this work, Descartes had the notion of space as the "container of things", independent of the things; thus he was able to say that the Earth moves, for instance. Descartes was forced to revise the definition of motion, so that he was able to say that "the Earth does not move", and at the same time he was able to advance a theory of motion; thus this revision was incorporated in the later Principia Philosophiae (1644). Be that as it may, Descartes' radical relativism set the stage for the later development of relativistic mechanics, as well as for the Newtonian doctrine of absolute space and time. The problems for any relativistic mechanics are far harder than you may imagine, since it must be able to treat on a par any frame which is in any state of motion. Thus, at least in this stage, Newton's choice (maybe intuitive) of introducing external frame (space and time) was quite reasonable, since it can dispense with infinite possibilities of motion and enables us to concentrate on far simpler motions with respect to the supposed frame of space and time, without regard to any other bodies in the world! It must be noted that in his argument against Descartes, Newton considers the possibility of defining a body's motion by reference to remote objects, such as fixed stars (later mentioned by Ernst Mach in the 19th century), but he quickly dismisses any such attempt as insufficient for determining the "natural and absolute motion" of a body, such as the Earth (Hall and Hall, 127). For any further analysis of De Gravitatione, Barbour's discussion is recommended. References Barbour, J. (2001), The Discovery of Dynamics, paperback ed., Oxford Univ. Press.

Nevertheless, even if Descartes' mechanistic natural philosophy shunned the metaphysics of substantial forms, his underlying methodology or approach to science remained very close to the Scholastic tradition. By the time of the composition of the Principles, Descartes had formulated a method that, like the Scholastics, strived to explain natural phenomena based on

the allegedly simple and irrefutable facts and/or observations, drawn from rational reflection on concepts or from everyday experience, about the most fundamental aspects of reality. These supposedly basic facts thereby provide the requisite metaphysical foundation for his physical hypotheses: in other words, one proceeds from our clear and distinct knowledge of general metaphysical items, such as the nature of material substance and its modes, to derive particular conclusions on specific types of physical processes, for instance the laws of nature. This method of conducting science is quite contrary to the modern approach, needless to say, since modern scientists do not first engage in a metaphysical search for first principles on which to base their work. Yet, this is exactly the criticism that Descartes leveled at Galileo's physics (in a letter to Mersenne from 1638): without having considered the first causes of nature, [Galileo] has merely looked for the explanations of a few particular effects, and he has thereby built without foundations (AT II 380; see, also, the Preface to the French translation of the Principles, AT IXB 511). The structure of the Principles, Descartes' most comprehensive scientific work, reflects these priorities: Part I recapitulates the arguments (well-known from the Meditations) for the existence of God, mental substance, and other metaphysical topics; whereas the remaining Parts proceed to explain the nature of material substance, physics, cosmology, geology, and other branches of science, supposedly based on these fundamental metaphysical truths. This preoccupation with metaphysical foundations, and the causal explanations of natural phenomena derived from them, might also account for the absence in the Principles of Descartes' more mathematical work in physics, such as his discovery of the law of light refraction. As he argued in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1628), pure mathematicians are only concerned with finding ratios and proportions, whereas natural philosophers are intent on understanding nature (AT X 393395). The development of modern physics, which is inextricably intertwined with modern mathematics, thus stands in sharp contrast to the latent Scholasticism evident in Descartes' metaphysical approach to physics.

Although avowedly anti-Aristotelian in many regards, particularly on the view, shared with atomists, that all qualitative change on the macroscopic scale is reducible to the rearrangement and/or motion of matter on the microscopic scale, it was Descartes' ambition to carry out this program by retaining what is essentially Aristotles notion of Prime Matter. The pure elements (earth, air, fire, and water) of Aristotle's physics could mutate into one another by alteration of the fundamental qualities definitive of them. These were the four haptic qualities of hot, cold, wet, and dry. Because of this, there had to be something distinguishable, at least in thought, from qualities that persist during elemental alteration. This quality-less substratum is what Aristotle referred to simply as matter, or as it is often called, Prime Matter, in order to avoid confusion with the macroscopically identifiable, quality-laden, homogenous portions of everyday objects. Unlike atomists, who attributed at least the quality of hardness (impenetrability) to the ultimate particles of matter, Descartes argued that matter, or synonymously, body [corpus] has no qualities whatsoever, but only quantity, i.e., extension. In other words, body and extension are literally one and the same [res extensa]. An immediate corollary is that there can be no vacuum, for that would require an extended region devoid of body --- a manifest contradiction. The task, then, was to show how all apparent qualities can be explained in terms of the infinite divisibility and rearrangement of extension with respect to itself. The task was grand indeed, for it's goal was to develop a unified celestial and terrestrial physics that could account equally for the

ductility of metals, magnetic attraction, the tides, the mechanism of gravity, the motion of the planets, the appearance and disappearance of comets, and the birth and death of stars (supernovae). Descartes published his system of the world in 1644 as the Principles of Philosophy (Principia Philosophae). Part II of the Principles lays out the thesis of the identity of space (extension) and matter, develops a definition of motion in the "true, or philosophical sense", and sets out the fundamental dynamical laws of his system. Motion, according to "the truth of the matter", is defined to be "the translation of one part of matter, or one body, from the vicinity of those bodies, which are immediately contiguous to it and are viewed as if at rest, to the vicinity of others." In consequence, Descartes points out, each body has a single motion proper to it (in contrast to the numerous relative motions that can be ascribed to it depending on which other bodies are selected in order to determine its place). It is this single proper motion that figures in his laws of motion. Of particular importance for Descartes' entire system, is that a body in circular motion has an endeavor [conatus] to recede from the center of rotation.

4. Newton's Manuscript De Gravitatione

This fact, together with Descartes' contention that a body also participates in the motion of a body of which it is a part, makes it difficult to reconcile Descartes' system of the world with his definition of proper motion. Newton concluded that the doctrine is in fact self-refuting and that, where Descartes needed to, he had surreptitiously helped himself to a notion of space independent of body, particularly in order to assign the desired degree of centrifugal conatus to the matter the planets and their satellites as they are swept about by celestial vortices of "subtle" matter. The untitled and unfinished manuscript which begins "De Gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum et solidorum ", written perhaps a decade or more before the Principia, consists for the most part of an extensive and scathing critique of Descartes doctrine of motion. The document, published for the first time in (Hall and Hall, 1962), is well worth the study for a glimpse at the development of Newton's thinking at a relatively young age. It manifestly embraces the doctrines of space and time later codified in the Principia. Notable, as well, is that each of the five arguments from the properties, causes and effects of motion advanced in the Scholium has a clearly identifiable antecedent in De Gravitatione. (See Rynasiewicz 1995 for details.) This makes it clear the extent to which the Scholium is concerned to argue specifically against the Cartesian system (as pointed out by Stein 1967), which Newton perceived to be the only other viable contender at the time.