PREFACE TO THE TRANSLATION OF THE MEMOIRS

To recall the authentic thoughts and words of Newton is the best way to honor the memory of the greatest natural philosopher. Newton’s writings and Newton himself have been thoroughly forgotten; only a few remember them, chiefly historians of science. How different is the fate of a great poet and of a great scientist. We remember every word of Horace, Shakespeare, Pushkin; every line has been commented upon, has entered the literary heritage, and the poet is right in foretelling:

No, I shall not wholly die; but the greater part of me,
Having escaped the grave, will live after death.

It is quite otherwise in science. The only large collection of Newton’s works was published in the eighteenth century and has not been reprinted since; a complete collection does not exist at all; Newton’s letters are scattered through various rare editions; the archive of Newton has in large part not been published. And what does the physicist, astronomer, and mathematician in many cases remember of Newton—if not in the majority of cases? The laws of mechanics and gravitation, experiments with a prism, interference rings, something about Newton’s disputes with Leibniz, and the Voltairean anecdote about the apple. Instead of a living image of unprecedented creative tension—there is the primitive scheme of an elementary textbook. The old glory, embodied chiefly by the saying “the law of Newton,” is only a pale shadow of the poet’s living glory.

The reasons for this are inevitable; there are many of them, but the chief one is the rapid development of science. In science we live in the present; the front lines, especially in our day, are continuously moving, while the trophies of the rear remain unexamined in the quiet and dust of libraries. In 1761 Lambert wrote to Euler (with regard to his “Photometry”): “If I sometimes use Newtonian terms, then this is roughly the same as applying the Ptolemaic system in spherical astronomy”; later Goethe called Newton’s Optics “an old nest of rats and owls.” In the history of science unexpected things sometimes happen. Newton’s optics is, for us in the epoch of the theories of light quanta and “wave mechanics,” considerably closer than Euler’s optics, not to mention Goethe’s. Acquaintance with it is of interest not only historically, but also for the present day.

For translation we have chosen two wholly different memoirs of Newton. “Theory of Light and Colors” is Newton’s first printed communication. This theory, in which “conjectures are not mixed with certainties,” will forever remain alive and unshakable, preserving its role in science, like mechanics and thermodynamics, whatever may happen to science. In form it is a most beautiful model of simple, clear, brief, and completely candid exposition. “This memoir,” writes Rosenberger, “is utterly distinctive; Newton wrote nothing else like it. It is full of amiable candor, vividly conveys the joy of discovery, and sets forth in detail—

casts aside all unsuccessful assumptions and the slow attainment of truth... Never afterward did Newton describe the development of his discoveries so freely.”

The second memoir is of an entirely different character. It is a hypothesis on the nature of light, written by the man who said “hypotheses non fingo.” In contrast to the “certainty” of the first memoir, Newton asks that “hypotheses not be confused with his other reasonings, nor that their certainty be judged by hypothesis”; he does not even consider himself obliged to answer objections against this memoir. The memoir was not printed during Newton’s lifetime, was not included in the collection of his optical works) and was printed only in 1752 in the History of the Royal Society*, from which the translation has been made. Here an all-embracing hypothesis of the ether is set forth, explaining gravitation, electricity, light, animal processes, etc.; here, too, is given an outline of a compromise corpuscular-wave theory of light, which in its basic idea is of great interest for the present day.

Various data, chiefly historical, explaining the memoirs have been collected in the notes placed at the end of the text.

Translating Newton is not easy; one has to seek a middle course between a word-for-word translation and undesirable modernization, but, in the words of one eighteenth-century translator: “Even the very worst translation is of far more use than nothing.”

S. Vavilov.