Traité de Mécanique Céleste.

£15,000 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books · No longer available

'the sequel to newton' First edition and a close-to-complete set of this monumental work of celestial mechanics, the most important after Newton's Principia. Traité de Mécanique Céleste is bibliographically complex, and 'any or all of the supplements may be lacking in some sets' (Hook Norman 1277). This set conforms to the collation laid out by Hook Norman save that the second errata statement in volume IV is on the list of tables rather than on 2K4v, and volume V is lacking the supplement, Avertissement and part-titles. All the other supplements are present. There are two issues of volumes I and II, this being the issue with the imprint of Crapelet and Duprat and the French Republican date AN VII on the title pages. 'Here Laplace applied his mathematical theories of probability to celestial bodies and concluded that the apparent changes in the motion of planets and their satellites are changes of long periods, and that the solar system is in all probability very stable' (Hook Norman). This was a level of certainty absent from the work of Newton who, 'like Euler, was doubtful whether the variable forces acting in the solar system could be permanently maintained in an equilibrium' without the intervention of a creator (Printing and the Mind of Man 252). 'Laplace maintained that while all planets revolve around the sun their eccentricities and the inclinations of their orbits to each other will always remain small. He also showed that all these irregularities in movements and p

• Binding: Hardcover

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