Talk:Ismaël Bullialdus

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This article was automatically assessed because at least one article was rated and this bot brought all the other ratings up to at least that level. BetacommandBot 03:44, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Newton's praise of Bullialdus
Can somebody verify that Newton refers to Bullialdus? I can't find it in books.google.com copies of "Principia". TedHuntington 02:29, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I couldn't find it either. There is a reference to Bullialdus by Newton on Book 3 Phenomenon 4, but he praises him for his work with tables. There is no mention of giving priority to Bullialdus for inverse square law. I think if no one can confirm it, the reference to Newton's praise should be deleted. Zeyn1 (talk) 19:05, 17 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Even the assertion that Newton "praises him for his tables" goes a little too far. The quotation provided only shows that Newton had a favourable attitude to Bullialdus's determination of the sizes of  the planets' orbits.  Bullialdus's theory of the motions of the planets was not as good as Kepler's, and by the time Newton wrote the Principia, Bullialdus's tables had been generally recognised not sufficiently accurate (see, for example, page 176 of Curtis Wilson's article, Predictive Astronomy, in Planetary Astronomy from the Renaissance to the rise of astrophysics, Part A: Tycho Brahe to Newton). I shall amend the article accordingly.
 * The original claim in the article, that Newton praised Bullialdus for the inverse-square law and the accuracy of his tables, appears to have come from the the MacTutor biography of the latter. However, since an electronic search of the Principia itself&mdash;which I have also performed&mdash;uncovers no favourable comments by Newton other than the one cited by Zeyn1, I don't believe the MacTutor biography should be used as justification for including this stronger claim in the article.
 * &mdash;David Wilson (talk · cont) 15:47, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

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