I'm no historian, so you're going to have to ask another web site about Aristotle's family life or lack thereof.
But I did recently read James Glieck's fine biography of Sir
Isaac, and he explains the first puzzle in the beginning of his "notes"
at the end. To paraphrase:
In Newton's time, the English calendar ran at first ten and then
eleven days behind the calendar in most of Europe. Furthermore, the
year in England was considered to start March 25, not January 1, and so
when Newton died on England's March 20, it was 1726 in England and 1727
in Europe.
You would think that this sorry state of affairs would be a great
starting point to question the nature of absolute time and of
simultenaity. But one of Newton's great achievements was to think of
idealized systems which were not affected by things like friction or
air resistance, in which the laws of physics are simple. Cutting
through the clutter of the definition of time is a more obvious
improvement and it probably didn't occur to anyone that the idea of
simultenaity would have to be though about more carefully later on.
One of my favorite quotes from Misner, Thorne and Wheeler's book on
general relativity: "Time is defined so motion looks simple." (not
according to 17th century European calendars!)
Tom
(published on 10/22/2007)
