This is a 'hard-to-read' book. The great mind builds up the world on his simple principles. He does not use his inventions that are now known as differentiation and integration. He only uses Euclid's geometry to build the world upon his three principles, with the majesty like God's. It's not so good as a course book for mechanics. He takes the hard but rigorous way than to take the way that is easy but yet lacks the rigour in his time. The Door to Heaven is narrow and hard to follow. But you can feel how a human mind can be great by just opening this book and look at the scratch of the lion's claw.

Forgive me first of all for even attempting this review of "The Principia"...but would any of you attempt to even review the Bible, the Quran or the Bhagvad Gita...??? The Principia is something that should be worshipped not as the work of a mere mortal, but that of the greatest genius of all time... this was the pinnacle of thought, and none since Newton's time has come even close to matching his scientific prowess...forget Einstein, even he did not consider himself worthy of comparison with Newton, for Newton was a theoretician par experimentor par excellence...(Einstein was often apalled by his own poor ability to experiment)..

Here was where Newton introduced his theory of gravity and theory of light and his version of the Calculus...but a word of caution...be afraid, DO NOT attempt to learn these subjects from this book...the real purpose of this book is this...to hold it in your hand's and dissolve into tears as you read the mind of the man who came closest to reading God's thoughts...when, years later, Newton was asked how he hit upon his ideas, he replied "By thinking upon them " !! How very helpful, eh..??

Buy this book, treasure it, read it if you can, and all the while, remember Alexander Pope's words:
"Nature and Nature's laws
lay hid in the night;
God said 'Let Newton be !',
And all was light !"

I am responding to the person who wrote the second review, the student who decided to use this book to study for an exam in basic calculus. What are you, crazy? Why would ANYONE think they could learn "baby calc" from the great book in which Newton elucidated his theory of the universe!? Did you think about asking anyone, first? I'm a college math prof and my guess is that ANY math teacher would have suggested you study from a modern, elementary calc book, instead. (Then you make matters worse by giving the book a bad review!) At any rate, if you would like a good, modern translation of Newton's Principia, this is the place to go. You really should know some calc and basic mechanics, however - remember, this book, was written by one of the greatest minds in the human history, and it was NOT meant to be a textbook for the novice. Please do not let review # 2 steer you away..........

I've seen bad reviews for master works of science in the past. Mostly they claim these books are either not clear or impossible to understand. Don't buy this book for the purpose of learning Classical Mechanics or Calculus from it, but for the scientific curiosity of learning how the great Isaac Newton presented his revolutionary scientific ideas to the world. Of course, it is difficult to read. This is a translation of a book written in Latin more than 300 years ago!

This book is a jewel. Just like the original works of Einstein, Maxwell, Heisenberg, Schroedinger and all those giants. Many of the ideas presented in the book were written for the first time in history and probably they are not organized in a didactic form. The person buying this book should not expect to find a clear textbook when originally it was not written for the layman, but for the expert scientific community of its time. Buy this book, sit back, scan through it, and enjoy a true piece of history.

I reckon the book gives a very good measure of Sir Isaac Newton's interests in philosophy. One shoulk ask why philosophy? Well we have to say that this writings contain some of the best arguments ever used in defense of God's existence. Moreover, the "Four letters to Mr. Richard Bentley" contain what should be considered the argument of "imperfection" for the existence of a Voluntary Agent in the Universe. Nobody before Newton dared to say that from the imperfection of this world it follows that God neccessarily exists. This argument will be, of course, a great subject for the criticism of Leibniz and Descartes' disciples. Then again, the book contains a very good paper on the natural and un-natural motion of celestial bodies, a very good treatise in itself on inertia and gravity, which makes us wonder whether our modern view on the universe is a Newtonian or a Cartesian one. After all the theme is very actual and it has not lost it's strenght.

Having done a Ph.D. in optics, I have read quite some books on optics and out of curiocity I bought this book, but I am not very pleased with it. First, it is difficult to read because of the old English language and structure. For native English speakers this carries perhaps not so much weight, but for me it did. Second, because it is a collection of Newton's works, it contains of course also many not-so-interesting discussions which you have to 'consume' before realising it was not so interesting.

What is nice though, is that the book contains many so-called queries, which are possible explanations of various optical phenomena, explanations/assumptions Newton could not prove/disprove at the time. This is fascinating reading, because many of these turned out to be true (or false, but even then: still interesting to know what he thought).

Overall impression: if you are interested in the history of optics/Newton then it is a nice book. But just for browsing in the evening: no.

"Though Mr. Newton is no physicist, his book is very interesting." -- Father Nicolas Malebranche (1707)