Émilie du Châtelet focused on natural philosophy, particularly that of Newton, Leibniz and Christian Wolff.
She translated and annotated Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” into French, which includes her derivation of conservation of energy.
Nonetheless, she was more than just an expositor of others' works, and she was not interested in physics alone. Indeed, still squarely in the tradition of natural philosophy, Du Châtelet sought a metaphysical basis for the Newtonian physics she embraced upon rejecting Cartesianism.
Know more:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emilie-du-chatelet/
Image: Portrait of Émilie du Châtelet by Maurice Quentin de La Tour, mid 1700s.
#womeninscience #newton
The basis is of course epistemological, working outward in. This is why those who seek to build it up inside out from metaphysical atoms always miss some portion of it.
ReplyDeleteTo paraphrase Bucky Fuller:
When I am trying to solve a problem, I start with the whole of Universe and winnow irrelevancies until what remains are the essential set of considerations of my experience that apply.