The Laws of Motion
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Newton’s Laws of Motion. In 1687 Isaac Newton attempted to explain the movements of everything in the universe, from a pea rolling on a plate to the position of the planets. It was a brilliant, vaultingly ambitious and fiendishly complex task; it took him three sentences. These are the three laws of motion with which Newton founded the discipline of classical mechanics and conjoined a series of concepts - inertia, acceleration, force, momentum and mass - by which we still describe the movement of things today. Newton’s laws have been refined over the years - most famously by Einstein - but they were still good enough, 282 years after they were published, to put Neil Armstrong on the Moon.
Guests
- Simon Schaffer
25 episodes
Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Darwin College - Raymond Flood
2 episodes
University Lecturer in Computing Studies and Mathematics and Senior Tutor at Kellogg College, University of Oxford - Rob Iliffe
2 episodes
Professor of Intellectual History and History of Science at the University of Sussex
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Programme ID: b009mvj0
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b009mvj0
Auto-category: 530.1 (Classical mechanics)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello. In 1687, Isaac Newton attempted to explain the movements of everything in the universe, from a pea rolling on a plate to the position of Pluto.