Philologist Daniel Hook discovered a significant error in the translation of Newton's first law that had gone unnoticed for more than three centuries since the publication of "Principia" in 1687. The results of this unexpected discovery were presented to the scientific community in the publication Philosophy of Science, gazeta.ru reports.
For centuries, Newton's first law was taught in the form: "a body remains at rest or moves uniformly unless acted upon by an external force". However, Hook's research has shown that the key conjunction in the original text, traditionally translated as "if", is more correctly interpreted as "because" or "due to".
This linguistic clarification is important because it helps resolve a number of disagreements that arose among physicists when interpreting this law.