Emilie du Châtelet and her work on Newton's Principia

https://narratively.com/the-pregnant-scientist-who-raced-against-death-to-transform-physics/

by pseudolus • 6 years ago

126 29 6 years ago

VRay• 6 years ago

More info about Émilie du Châtelet and her work on her Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89milie_du_Ch%C3%A2telet

lopmotr• 6 years ago

Her work was a translation of Newton's Principia into French? That's good and all, but it's not scientific discovery. It's understandable that she's not widely recognized if she didn't make any important discoveries.

throwawayhhakdl• 6 years ago

Yeah... reading the article I don’t see any mention of the impact it had. Principia had been out for over 60 years at the time.

I think the article is being overly dramatic with her race against death as well. The life expectancy number is completely irrelevant. The overall figure doesn’t matter. Once you’ve made it to 20 years old your life expectancy was probably in the 70s-ish even at that time.

Maternal death in childhood looked to be about 0.3%. Current stats say about x8 for women over 40, so let’s say x20 for those times... 6%? Non trivial for sure. And yes, she did die. But far from a death sentence.

thaumaturgy• 6 years ago

Her work was a translation of Principia into French ... in a society which excluded her from many of the academic resources that male translators would have had access to at the time, completed under a grueling schedule, with annotations, including her own original contribution in extending Newtonian mechanics with a law of overall conservation of energy. Her work went on to be one of the foundational texts of the French Enlightenment.

I knew nothing of her until a few minutes ago and it's really a shame that one of the first comments in this thread isn't going into more detail about her contributions but rather incuriously dismisses her.

luckylion• 6 years ago

RE dismissal: if you politicize everything, be ready for everyone to answer according to their politics.

Using hyperbolic click bait titles is a political statement, it's basically a Tweet as a HN submission. If you want to be less generous: it's trolling, and if done as a comment, it would get moderated and the account banned if it's a pattern.

You could link an article about Lincoln titled "Abraham Lincoln's struggle with X" or "The Republican that fought the Democrats to end SLAVERY and how he overcame his greatest challenge". Guess what title will lead to comments on the topic and which will result in a political shouting match.

dang6• 6 years ago

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

l10001• 6 years ago

Could you stop your mindless dictatorial attitude? The title says "work on Newton's Principia", which suggests at least minor original contributions to the work itself.

Who do you think you are to rudely lecture people who may be more qualified than yourself?

You are the one who is constantly rude here.

vikramkr• 6 years ago

According to the wiki on her, her commentary on the principia included "a profound contribution to Newtonian mechanics—the postulate of an additional conservation law for total energy, of which kinetic energy of motion is one element. This led to her conceptualization of energy as such, and to derive its quantitative relationships to the mass and velocity of an object."

So no, it wasn't just a translation of the principia. It seems she was also a philosopher and an early financial pioneer in developing financial derivatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89milie_du_Ch%C3%A2telet

ajna91• 6 years ago

From wikipedia, it seems that her translation became the standard in France which helped drive the scientific revolution in mainland Europe.

Furthermore:

"Her commentary includes a profound contribution to Newtonian mechanics—the postulate of an additional conservation law for total energy, of which kinetic energy of motion is one element. This led to her conceptualization of energy as such, and to derive its quantitative relationships to the mass and velocity of an object."

dang6• 6 years ago

All: we've replaced the baity title above. Please stay on the interesting side of this topic and ignore whatever reflexive reactions it may provoke. All that is predictable and we're here to learn something new. Flamewar comments impede that; they're agitating in a way that feels exciting, but intellectually they're just boring.

AlexCoventry• 6 years ago

Thanks, I skipped over it when it had the baity title, and it's turned out to be pretty interesting.

bnegreve• 6 years ago

This new title misses the point of the story.

The article is about science and social norms, no so much about Newton's work.

rayiner• 6 years ago

The new title isn’t accurate either. She didn’t produce a translation, she produced a commentary. It included substantial original work addressing the 60 years of criticism of Newton’s theories. Moreover:

du Châtelet took the idiosyncratic mathematical proofs relating to the laws of attraction that had been most scrutinized by Newton’s critics and recast his geometrical equations into integral calculus.

This is an important point vis-a-vis the history of calculus. Newton used a geometric formulation of calculus. The continent, meanwhile, and eventually everyone else, use Liebniz’s formulation of calculus. That engendered a something of a divide that kept people on the continent from crediting Newton’s work. In addressing criticisms of Newton’s work, du Chatelet redid Newton’s equations using Liebniz’s formulation of calculus. It’s not necessarily click bait to say that was transformative, given that a lot of subsequent development of calculus and physics happened in France.

dang6• 6 years ago

Ok, I've replaced translation with work.

canada_dry• 6 years ago

a lot of subsequent development of calculus and physics happened in France.

Yes. For instance, it's almost certain that Joseph Fourier would have studied du Châtelet's work.

nyc111• 6 years ago

du Chatelet redid Newton’s equations using Liebniz’s formulation of calculus.

Newton did not use equations in his book, it was all done geometrically and with proportions.

redis_mlc• 6 years ago

Newton used a geometric formulation of calculus.

So did Leibniz. What do you think he meant by dx and dy? :)

btrettel• 6 years ago

I think scientific translations are undervalued in academia and the general public. Whether or not a direct scientific discovery is made is irrelevant in my view, as this work enables other discoveries to be made.

Still, making a good translation can require deep understanding of the subject and offers plenty of opportunity for scientific discovery. The translator can be one of the first few to understand an important work. I think most people would agree that understanding an important work early can be advantageous. At least a few of the scientific contributions I've made were motivated by things I translated, as appears to also be the case for Émilie du Châtelet.

An acquaintance of mine in linguistics told me that translations are treated as roughly equivalent to a conference paper in linguistics, where journal articles are considered first-class. I think this setup is better than the status-quo in engineering, CS, physics, or math where translations are often treated as a waste of time.

Today, most science is published in English, but for problems which have existed for a long time, it can be worthwhile to consult the foreign "archival literature" for important papers that haven't been translated or appreciated. (Or even digitized, frequently!)

Edit: If there's a particular paper you're interested in finding a translation of, I'd recommend looking at this Stack Exchange post I made about locating existing translations: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/93209/31143

dchichkov• 6 years ago

Sounds like some of the choices were suboptimal. In particular, sleeping 4 hours a night is ridiculously unhealthy. She might have actually lived much longer and kept her daughter alive, if she'd only kept 7-8 hours of night sleep. Seclusion and withdrawal from society is also not particularly healthy.

But. Amazing.

meowface2• 6 years ago

The "baity" part of it was by far the most interesting part, for me. The title once sounded like the premise for a potentially amazing movie, and now just seems boring and inapplicable for me and most other readers who otherwise would've clicked it with the previous title. (Not to knock the value of translating scientific works.)

If I were you, I'd retain some aspect of the "race against the clock before your probable untimely death which you know is soon coming" portion. Some baitiness is unavoidable when that's the story.

The misogynist trolls will probably flock to a comment section like this regardless, if there's something about a female technologist or scientist in the title. I think removing the old title is kind of letting them win.

dang6• 6 years ago

It's standard HN moderation to replace baity titles. Basically, it's the headline writers' job to sex up the title and make everything sound like a car chase, and it's our job to knock it back to size so readers can attend to the substance.

Part of the experiment of HN is to learn, together, how to calm ourselves down so we can find the quieter sort of material genuinely interesting again. There's plenty that's interesting here.

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22199116.)

meowface2• 6 years ago

I agree "The Pregnant Scientist Who Raced Against Death to Transform Physics" was way too extreme and in need of changing, but I still think totally neutering it is burying the lede.

ghaff• 6 years ago

No movie that I know of. But there is a play Emelie: La Marquise du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight.

ngcc_hk• 6 years ago

The reading option part is interesting.

The story. Well cultural shock a bit and sympathy a bit, and equal opportunity concern a bit;

... but not that interesting. Sorry. Did fall into the bait though :-)

jfengel• 6 years ago

Odd that the article doesn't mention what is arguably her most important contribution: conservation of energy, which isn't one of Newton's laws. Physics was very unformed at the time, even after the publication of Principia, and people were fumbling around to formalize concepts we take for granted now.

lucas_membrane• 6 years ago

Very odd that energy is not mentioned at all in the article. I do not believe that she conceived of conservation of energy in the modern sense, where energy includes heat and chemical energy, but she saw that Newton's laws of motion conserved something besides momentum, and she somehow tested that experimentally for some mechanical systems. Anyone have more info on this?

Emilie du Châtelet and her work on Newton's Principia

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