From CONOR O'CARROLL
I was intrigued by the advertisement for subscriptions to New Scientist
in your issue of 13 January. Newton did indeed surprise the world with the
laws of motion. He may even have said something like, ‘It is equal to the
force which, acting on a mass of one kilogramme, produces an acceleration
of one metre per second per second’. But I don’t think that the man who
produced the inverse square law would have had a clue about metres and kilogrammes
(the metric system had its beginnings in the 1790s). New Scientist certainly
does have its surprises!
Conor O’Carroll Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh
