The Archaeology of the Inverse Square Law: (2) The Use and Non-Use of Mathematics

History of Science 44 (1):49-67 (2006)
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Abstract

The following is the second part of our Archaeology of the Inverse Square Law. Together these papers examine the transformation of the inverse square ratio from its origins in a metaphysical image of medieval thought in Grosseteste and the perspectivist tradition, through a playful magical practice in the Renaissance with Cusanus and Dee, and into a mathematical tool, applicable to the physical world. This last transformation allowed Newton to condense the geometrical image into a celebrated algebraic equation for universal gravity, but it proved particularly confusing for the people who wrought it, Kepler and Hooke.

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Hooke versus Newton.Johs Lohne - 1960 - Centaurus 7 (1):6-52.

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