Newton's First Law mistranslated

[Swammerdami]

Poor Sir Isaac. Once considered the greatest scientific genius who ever lived, many of his ideas have been refuted.

His Law of Gravitation produced a tiny error when used to predict the orbit of Mercury. Albert Einstein had heart palpitations when he found that his own theory predicted that orbit correctly! (Einstein did NOT devise his theory to explain such discrepancies; he derived the theory with pure thought.)

In 1801 Thomas Young did the first double-slit experiment laying to rest Newton's mistaken belief that light was not waves.

Newton's three Laws of Motion are even more venerable and still form the basis of elementary physics, but the Third Law is confusing, and the First and Second -- already known to ancients -- seem too trivial.

And in fact the First Law of Motion is useless and/or poorly phrased:

Every object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force.

Useless! Every object IS compelled by external force, e.g. friction or gravity. Even asteroids in space follow elliptic or parabolic paths rather than straight lines, as Newton knew well. It is like saying "Every day is a feast for the gods of bestiality unless it is one of the first 31 days of a month." -- Arguably true, but useless.

BUT wait! Newton didn't write his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in English; he wrote in Latin:

Corpus omne perseverare in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi uniformiter in directum, nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur statum illum mutare.

For 336 years we have been victimized by a faulty translation of Newton's First Law. Scientific American noted this a few months ago:

Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by the forces impressed.

Even Google Translate does better than the 18th-century translator of Newton's laws. (Never mind that Google substitutes "in so far" for "insofar" despite that experiments show Google is well aware of the better phrasing.)

Every body must persist in its state of rest or of moving uniformly in a straight direction, except in so far as it is forced to change that state by impressed forces.

Fortunately physicists have used the correct formulation for centuries. No PDEs will need to be modified.