ABSTRACT
This is Hooke’s Programme, and it presents quite a mystery. In this, its final version – which Hooke sent to Newton on 17 January 1680, concluding a short and intense correspondence between the two – the Programme looks extremely familiar. And not only to the uninitiated layman, who may see here, with unchecked hindsight, the now selfevident elements of Newtonian cosmology: inertial motion, curved into an oval by a centripetal force declining with the square of distance. It also appears almost trivial to the trained historian of seventeenth-century science, who recognizes Kepler’s motive power, Descartes’s motion and Huygens’s style investigation of curves. Yet, we well know, this combination of ideas was completely foreign to all these venerable members of the honorary order of the new science, let alone their less innovative contemporaries. So much so, that the designated reader of this paragraph, Isaac Newton, definitely the most skilled person of his time to understand Hooke’s Programme and perceive its importance, had to be tutored through it carefully and almost reluctantly. And so much so, that even its author, Robert Hooke, had to be helped with some of its seemingly most trivial aspects.
