Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Newton's editor? Emilie du Châtelet.

A biographer has made an extraordinary claim about a woman previously known (by a few) as Voltaire's lover...
Love and the Enlightenment | The woman behind the man | Economist.com:

EVERYONE, just about, has heard something about Voltaire, and most of it is flattering. Freethinker, dramatist, poet, scientist, economist, spy, politician and successful speculator to boot, he embodies the intellectual breakthrough of the Enlightenment...

... Almost nobody has heard of the woman with whom he shared most of his life, Emilie du Châtelet. But you can make a good case that she was a more rigorous thinker, a better writer, a more systematic scientist, a formidable mathematician, a wizard gambler, a more faithful lover and a much kinder and deeper person. And she did all this despite being born a woman in a society where female education was both scant and flimsy. Her mother feared that anything more academic than etiquette lessons would make her daughter unmarriageable.

David Bodanis's new biography of Emilie, Marquise du Châtelet, is a belated treatment of a startlingly neglected story...

... Born in 1706, Emilie had three pieces of great good fortune in her life. The first was to be born with a remarkable brain. Her greatest work was to translate the “Principia”, the path-breaking work on physics by the secretive Cambridge brainbox, Isaac Newton, who died when Emilie was 20. She did not just translate his writing from Latin to French; she also expressed Newton's obscure geometric proofs using the more accessible language of calculus. And she teased out of his convoluted web of theorems the crucial implications for the study of gravity and energy. That laid the foundation for the next century's discoveries in theoretical physics. The use of the square of the speed of light, c², in Einstein's most famous equation, E=mc² is directly traceable to her work.

Ok. That's not exactly a modest claim. If it's true there's one hell of a story that's been missed for far too long. We need to get this story into In Our Times, and start rewriting those history of science texts ...

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