this sounds like a Mike Gilleland problem!

Headline:

We've Been Misreading a Major Law of Physics For Almost 300 Years

When Isaac Newton inscribed onto parchment his now-famed laws of motion in 1687, he could have only hoped we'd be discussing them three centuries later.

Writing in Latin, Newton outlined three universal principles describing how the motion of objects is governed in our Universe, which have been translated, transcribed, discussed and debated at length.

But according to a philosopher of language and mathematics, we might have been interpreting Newton's precise wording of his first law of motion slightly wrong all along.

Virginia Tech philosopher Daniel Hoek wanted to "set the record straight" after discovering what he describes as a "clumsy mistranslation" in the original 1729 English translation of Newton's Latin Principia.

Based on this translation, countless academics and teachers have since interpreted Newton's first law of inertia to mean an object will continue moving in a straight line or remain at rest unless an outside force intervenes.

It's a description that works well until you appreciate external forces are constantly at work, something Newton would have surely considered in his wording.

Revisiting the archives, Hoek realized this common paraphrasing featured a misinterpretation that flew under the radar until 1999, when two scholars picked up on the translation of one Latin word that had been overlooked: quatenus, which means "insofar", not unless.

To Hoek, this makes all the difference. Rather than describing how an object maintains its momentum if no forces are impressed on it, Hoek says the new reading shows Newton meant that every change in a body's momentum – every jolt, dip, swerve, and spurt – is due to external forces.

"By putting that one forgotten word [insofar] back in place, [those scholars] restored one of the fundamental principles of physics to its original splendor," Hoek explained in a blog post describing his findings, published academically in a 2022 research paper.

However, that all-important correction never caught on. Even now it might struggle to gain traction against the weight of centuries of repetition.

"Some find my reading too wild and unconventional to take seriously," Hoek remarks. "Others think that it is so obviously correct that it is barely worth arguing for."

Ordinary folks might agree it sounds like semantics. And Hoek admits the reinterpretation hasn't and won't change physics. But carefully inspecting Newton's own writings clarifies what the pioneering mathematician was thinking at the time.

I don't know enough Latin to be competent at translation, and I haven't looked into how to access Newton's original Principia via an online source, so it'll be up to better minds than mine to interpret the significance of this apparent quirk (or redressing of errors) in translation. Over at Instapundit, where I found the link to this article, commenters don't seem all that excited (remember—this is an over-60 crowd):

Jebus Cripes…! If there is one trope on the internet I am totally sick of, it’s the ‘Yer Doin’ it Wrong!’ trope. Every platform has [its] collection of dimwits who think they’ve figured out ‘a better way’ of doing something that people have done for years. And every single time their ‘new way’ is either the same way, or a stupider way of doing something. And here’s another one. ‘Insofar’ has no physical impact on how the law is understood. And the article is just annoyingly stupid.

So, no Newtonian laws erected[,] broken[,] or changed. Got it.

A distinction without a difference. I would expect no less from academia.

Thag only lowly software engineer, but Thag no understand how this new interpretation make any difference.

No longer relevant. We have since progressed from the subtleties in Newton's writings to the subtleties in Einstein's legacy, and that progress has been experimentally validated.

[Ideally "unless,"] but practically, "until, and that's now to varying degrees" Got it. Moving on.