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Details
GASSENDI, Pierre (1592-1655). De motu impresso a motore translato. Paris: Ludovicus de Hequeville, 1642.
4° (216 x 170mm). Woodcut device on title, woodcut diagrams, woodcut headpieces and initials. (Occasional light soiling.) Contemporary vellum, sprinkled edges (lightly soiled). Provenance: early annotations (some in green, probably faded from black) — cancelled shelf mark on title.
FIRST EDITION of Gassendi’s treatise on inertia. Gassendi, a ‘pioneer of observational astronomy… On one point — and it is an important one — was more successful than Galileo: he correctly stated the principle of inertia. The experiment… performed in 1640 in Marseilles, overthrew the argument of Copernicus’s opponents against the movement of the earth. Gassendi arranged to have a weight dropped from the top of a vertical mast on a moving ship in order to demonstrate that it fell at the foot of the mast and not behind it, thus sharing in its fall the forward motion of the ship…. Motion is, in itself, a physical state, a measurable quantity, not – as the Scholastic maintained – the change from one state to another. It changes only through the interposition of another movement or of an obstacle’ (DSB). RARE ON THE MARKET: no copies recorded in ABPC/RBH. Not in any of the standard bibliographies.
4° (216 x 170mm). Woodcut device on title, woodcut diagrams, woodcut headpieces and initials. (Occasional light soiling.) Contemporary vellum, sprinkled edges (lightly soiled). Provenance: early annotations (some in green, probably faded from black) — cancelled shelf mark on title.
FIRST EDITION of Gassendi’s treatise on inertia. Gassendi, a ‘pioneer of observational astronomy… On one point — and it is an important one — was more successful than Galileo: he correctly stated the principle of inertia. The experiment… performed in 1640 in Marseilles, overthrew the argument of Copernicus’s opponents against the movement of the earth. Gassendi arranged to have a weight dropped from the top of a vertical mast on a moving ship in order to demonstrate that it fell at the foot of the mast and not behind it, thus sharing in its fall the forward motion of the ship…. Motion is, in itself, a physical state, a measurable quantity, not – as the Scholastic maintained – the change from one state to another. It changes only through the interposition of another movement or of an obstacle’ (DSB). RARE ON THE MARKET: no copies recorded in ABPC/RBH. Not in any of the standard bibliographies.
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