Student, No Apple Polisher, Proves Newton Wrong
It didn’t take an apple falling on his head, just a routine class assignment for a physics student to detect an error in Sir Isaac Newton’s “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” that had gone undetected for 300 years. Robert Garisto of the University of Chicago was working an equation in Proposition Eight of Book Three in the work, which was first published in 1687 and purported to explain how a unified system of scientific principles--gravity and motion--governs what happens on Earth. “What I found is that Newton, using his own data, plugged the wrong value into a calculation and came up with a discrepancy of about 15%,” the 23-year-old student said. In the equation, Newton needed to know the angle between a line from the center of the Earth to the sun and a line from a point on the Earth’s surface to the sun. Newton’s notes indicated that he believed the figure to be 10.5 seconds, but he mysteriously used 11 seconds in the equation, the error that Garisto discovered. Garisto submitted his findings to the scientific honor society Sigma Xi and won the university chapter’s Prize for Excellence in Science.
--Some critics of an ordinance that bans foretelling the future are predicting that it could end up hamstringing doctors and weather reports, not to mention stock brokers. The 25-year-old ordinance in St. Augustine, Fla., makes it illegal to predict the future for compensation and targets clairvoyants, palmists and other fortunetellers. But City Commissioner Vicki Sellner said the law could also apply to doctors diagnosing the course of an ailment and to weather forecasters. City Atty. Geoffrey Dobson noted that it could hamper “the account executive . . . who thinks tomorrow Ford (stock) will go up.” City commissioners said they don’t want the city to be overrun with soothsayers, but Dobson said he will submit a wording change in the ordinance to allow those with an eye to the future to legally do business in St. Augustine.
--A member of Britain’s royal family will soon give up any claim to the throne by marrying a Roman Catholic woman. George, 24, Earl of St. Andrews, announced his engagement to Canadian divorcee Sylvana Tomaselli, five years his senior and a fellow student at Cambridge University. Under a 1701 law ensuring a Protestant succession, a member of the royal family who marries a Roman Catholic surrenders any rights to the throne, although his children move back into the line of candidates. The Earl of St. Andrews is No. 17 in line for the throne.
