Item #5860 Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, intorno à due nuove scienze Attenenti all mechanica & i movimenti locali ... con une appendice del centro di gravita à d’alcuni solidi. Galileo GALILEI.
Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, intorno à due nuove scienze Attenenti all mechanica & i movimenti locali ... con une appendice del centro di gravita à d’alcuni solidi.
Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, intorno à due nuove scienze Attenenti all mechanica & i movimenti locali ... con une appendice del centro di gravita à d’alcuni solidi.
Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, intorno à due nuove scienze Attenenti all mechanica & i movimenti locali ... con une appendice del centro di gravita à d’alcuni solidi.
Galileo’s Foundation of Modern Physics
Leiden, Elseveir, 1638.

Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, intorno à due nuove scienze Attenenti all mechanica & i movimenti locali ... con une appendice del centro di gravita à d’alcuni solidi.

4to [19.0 x 13.7 cm], (4) ff., 306 [recte 314] pp., (6) pp., with numerous woodcut diagrams and illustrations in text. Bound in contemporary English blind-ruled sheep, paper label on spine, 18th-century engraved Hopetoun bookplate. Hinges slightly rubbed and small chip to head of spine. A very clean, crisp copy.

First edition of Galileo’s most important work, the foundation of modern physics.

This work was Galileo’s ‘greatest scientific achievement … Mathematicians and physicists of the later seventeenth century, Isaac Newton among them, rightly supposed that Galileo had begun a new era in the science of mechanics. It was upon his foundation that Huygens, Newton and others were able to erect the frame of the science of dynamics, and to extend its range (with the concept of universal gravitation) to the heavenly bodies’ (PMM 130).

‘Unable to publish this treatise on mechanics in his own country because of the ban placed on his books by the Inquisition, he published it in Leyden. Considered the first modern textbook in physics, in it Galileo pressed forward the experimental and mathematical methods in the analysis of problems in mechanics and dynamics. The Aristotelian concept of motion was replaced by a new one of inertia and general principles were sought and found in the motion of falling bodies, projectiles and in the pendulum. He rolled balls down an inclined plane and thereby verified their uniformly accelerated motion, acquiring equal increments of velocity in equal increments of time. The concept of mass was implied by Galileo’s conviction that in a vacuum all bodies would fall with the same acceleration. Newton said he obtained the first two laws of motion from this book’ (Dibner).

The book has a dedication to the Comte de Noailles, French ambassador to Italy, dated Arcetri, 6 March 1638, in which Galileo praised the publishers for their taste and skill. With all his writings banned by the Inquisition, Galileo had given the manuscript to De Noailles with instructions to have it published in Leiden by the Elseveirs, to whom Galileo owed a debt of gratitude for the publicity given to his earlier writings, the Latin translations of the Dialogo and Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina published in 1635 and 1636.

 The binding is a typical ‘cheap’ English binding of the period, with no pastedowns, leaving the pasteboards showing.

Carli and Favaro 162; Cinti 102; Dibner 141; Evans 27; Horblit 36; Norman 859; Parkinson pp 80-81; PMM 130; Sparrow 75.

 

Sold

See all items in Rare Books
See all items by