Time and the Earth’s rotation in Newton’s <i>Principia</i>

Isaac Newton’s proof of the Copernican system is a very well-researched topic, and for very good reasons: it is the argument that—according to a standard narrative—crowned the Scientific Revolution, bringing the great Copernican debate opened in 1543 to a close in 1687. This argument, especially through the notions of absolute and relative time and space, immediately aroused sharp and deep criticisms from the likes of Christiaan Huygens and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Albert Einstein redrew the edifice of physics from scratch in such a way as to make Newton’s approach obsolete. Einstein’s quotation I provided as an epigraph states one of his main objections. Newton’s approach, aimed at discovering the forces causing planetary motions, appeared to Einstein to be marred by a logical fallacy.