Doors and Bar open at 7pm for a 7:30pm start, beginning with a performance from The Huntingdon Guitar Ensemble.
The Dispute which broke a reputation and sealed another. But who had the last laugh?
The play is a dramatisation of the dispute over ‘Priority’ between Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz.
• Priority, is about the question of who discovered calculus first.
• The Settling of this increasingly acrimonious dispute was entrusted to the Royal Society. The dispute itself was between, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz,
• The investigation started in 1699. The ruling was made in 1712. The ruling was precipitated, when Leibniz made an official complaint, after an accusation of plagiarism.
• Newton was at that time, president of the Royal Society and he selected the committee making the investigation into priority.
• Today, it is generally accepted, they both discovered calculus independently. Newton in the 1660’s, Leibniz in the 1670’s.
• Leibniz published first in 1684 and it is his notation we use today.
The dispute is also about a wider disagreement that was not settled until Albert Einstein used Leibniz ideas about the relativity of time and space in his theories of special and general relativity.
• The Personal Dispute: Who discovered Calculus first?
• The Scientific Dispute: Is about the Idea of Absolute Time, Space and Movement vs relative time, space and movement.
• The Philosophical Dispute is about Empiricism Vs Rationalism.