I had an elective class at St. John's where we read selections from Newton's Principia (ISBN 9781888009262) together with William Blake's long poem "Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion".

The goal was not to learn how to do physics calculations, but to understand each writer's concept of reality and humanity's relationship to it. I remember that Blake really focused on the worth of actually instantiated reality, what he called "minute particulars", in contrast to Newton's abstractions:

    He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars
    General Good is the plea of the scoundrel hypocrite & flatterer:
    For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars
    And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power.

Also, Newton's Principia uses Euclidian-style demonstrations to illustrate many of his points, whereas today we would use algebraic calculus. That was fun, since everyone in the room had also worked through the first book of Euclid's Elements.

Similarly, a related project is an effort to assemble a chronological list of books where the oldest text which is still valid given contemporary knowledge of the subject is listed includes Euclid's _Elements_ of course:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355?shelf=chronol...

One issue I have with modern teaching of both Math and Physics though is that they give the "correct" answer to fast which teaches the material and accelerates learning but I think it also leaves a lot of motivations for why certain decisions were come to and how which is important.

Recently I've been following long with the Distance Ladder challenge I saw on 3 blue 1 brown with Terence Tao. Going through those question is motivating because those questions are based in solving navigational problems. I fear that with the ever increasing the low friction in life we are stealing the challenge and things for people to consider to build up there problem solving ability before the curtain is pulled.

I think its also more motivating to learn considering more interesting questions especially in math. All this to say going back to the source material while not the most modern accurate physics it usually does include large amounts of motivation to explain why things are logical and what they are doing it for. To be fair I haven't read the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia but I have read other old book and wager it has similarities

This is how I feel about learning street fighter. On one hand yes I can learn how to do Ed’s dream combo by watching Momochi in tournament then reading a discord message that writes it in numpad notation, but I think it’s equally important to understand what motivated him to sit in training mode and figure it out. What was he trying to achieve other than an optimal combo? What situations was he looking for answers in?

I really like this analogy thank you :) It really captures the argument but in a totally different way know what to do is not quick useful if you don't know why you are doing it. One is entirely high level of thinking.

Hmm but you can (an in fact do, in many physics programs) follow the historical development of theories using modern textbooks. The pedagogical value is in understanding, not exactly in wading through the archaic language and the confused early papers.

Even for modern theories like general relativity people study by textbooks written many decades after the fact, with a clear picture after things were settled, and not by Einstein's first papers :)

Absolutely but I think when people are first learning math especially they ask this question, why are we learning things like trig and or logarithms? The answer we give is usually they are important for the future math people learn. That is very uninspiring to students in my opinion (ages 12-18). While its true they will use them in the future those two things were invented to reason about the distance between the sun and the moon, the size of the earth, and other hard questions. Even doing machine tool work you'll quickly develop an appreciation for trig if you are doing any time of manual machining.

Logarithms were used percisely because they made long tedious multplication and division into simple additiona and subtraction. That's really valuable if you don't have calculators but when we don't talk about this it makes things feel arbitray. There properties don't stop being useful after we have calculators either but the motivation in my academic career was basically ignored until college (sample size of 1 :( ) but I think its something that I hear from many many people.

> Trying to learn Newtonian Mechanics from Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica is kinda dumb though.

It'd be like wanting to improve your cardio health so you try to climb K2. The edition I have has 150+ pages of just introduction. You have to wade through all of that just to be able to figure out how to read the rest of the tome. It is cool, though!

Let’s be honest, trying to learn Newtonian mechanics by majoring in the humanities probably isn’t the best approach. Maybe that’s not really what the program is meant for in the first place.

Newton intentionally made it difficult because he didn’t want to be bothered by questions from lesser minds.