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Hello, in 1687 Isaac Newton attempted to explain the movements of everything in

the universe from a pea rolling on a plate to the position of Pluto.

It was a brilliant, vaultingly ambitious and fiendishly complex task.

It took him three sentences.

These are the three laws of motion which Newton founded, on which Newton founded the

discipline of classical mechanics and conjoined a series of concepts,

inertia, acceleration, force, momentum and mass by which we still describe the movement of things today.

Newton's laws have been refined over the years, most famously about Einstein, but they were still good enough

two hundred and eight years after they were published to put Neil Armstrong on the moon.

With me to discuss Isaac Newton's extraordinary achievements are Simon Shaffer,

Professor in History and Philosophy of Science

at the University of Cambridge

and Fellow of Darwin College.

Robert Eiliff, Professor of Intellectual History

and History of Science at the University of Sussex, and Raymond Flood, University of Lecture and History of Science at the University of Sussex and Raymond Flood,

University of Lecture in Computing, Studies and Mathematics and Senior Tutor of

Kellogg College, University of Oxford.

Sam and Schaff and Newton's three laws of motion were first published, I said in the Principity in 1687.

We'll talk about them in detail later in the program, but what was he trying to encapsulate

in these laws of motion?

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