Physicist: Mozi Predated Newton's First Law by a Millennium
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- Project Hail Mary, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller with NASA science advisors, rendered Newton's laws of motion in space so accurately that a physicist in the audience gasped — in one scene, Ryan Gosling's unbuckled character slams into a panel when the ship lurches, a collision that, per Newton's first law, would realistically have killed him since space lacks the forces that slow such motion on Earth.
- Mozi, a Zhou Kingdom philosopher, and his followers wrote down something resembling Newton's first law — that an object in motion stays in motion — in the Mo Ching over a millennium before Isaac Newton's birth, according to the physicist, who made the connection while researching a new book called "The Edge of Space-Time."
- The author, a physics professor, spent three weeks studying the only three known English translations of the Mo Ching, an experience that pushed them to read Newton's original Principia in both Latin and English for the first time and reframed decades of teaching introductory mechanics.
- Newton's first law is universal, the article notes: in a cricket match, gravity and ground forces stop a batted ball, but in space — far from massive gravitational sources — an object keeps moving indefinitely, which is why unbuckled astronauts become projectiles and why a film object thrown from a ship sails forever in a straight line.
- The physicist called the film experience a moment of "synergy": NASA science advisors enabled the film's art, which itself depended on the translation work of humanities scholars who brought the Mo Ching into English — a chain the author credits for their own IMAX revelation.
Why it matters: If the Mo Ching does prefigure Newton's first law, it pushes the documented history of foundational mechanics concepts back more than a thousand years and repositions ancient Chinese philosophy as a genuine precursor to classical physics. The physicist's argument, however, rests on just three English translations of the Mo Ching — a thin evidentiary base for such a large attribution claim, and one the broader history-of-science community has not yet weighed in on in this piece.
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