Leonhard Euler’s Works on the Motion of the Moon: A Historiographical Shift

Abstract

In this chapter, the development of the historiography of L. Euler’s works on the motion of the Moon is examined. It is shown that the problem of constructing a mathematical Moon theory was central to the Swiss mathematician’s research program despite the wide variety of his interests in various problems of theoretical mechanics, calculus, and trigonometry. It is shown that the problem of the motion of the body in the central force field was critical for Euler and that he was able to achieve significant advance in solving the three-body problem. It is argued that the approach to L. Euler’s Moon theory was affected and dominated by the changes in paradigms of the Western philosophical tradition in the age of the scientific revolution of the twentieth century. Dilthey’s and Windelband’s approach to natural sciences as “nomothetical” made scholars of the late nineteenth century seek universal formulae in L. Euler’s theories and criticize him for providing only “partial solutions.” However, over the course of the twentieth century, Wingenstein’s and A. N. Whitehead’s philosophy of science slowly but gradually began to influence the studies of L. Euler’s concepts of the Moon’s motion: in the beginning of the twenty-first century, scholars started to appreciate that the Swiss mathematician’s formulae and solutions were similar to a complex language in which each formula and value was part of the general semantics of the answer, formulated as a system of complex cross-referenced derivations. A. N. Whitehead’s reevaluation of ontology that showed that physicists can only see and measure “atomic elements” of the processes that are otherwise precisely deterministic also contributed to appreciating the “partial solutions” of L. Euler as representing the basic ontological foundations of physics.