When did "tends to" first creep into the English statement of
Newton's First Law?
At lunch today I was given a British text from 1904 and was pleased
to see that it uses a quite literal translation from the Latin (as
well presenting the actual Latin text).
My copy of Sears & Zemansky from the '50's treats inertia as a 'fact'
rather than a 'tendency' as does Dull, Metcalf & Williams "Modern
Phys'ics" from the same time frame. (For some reason I was quite
prepared for them to use the 'tends to phrase.)
So far, the only 'authoritative' use of the phrase that I have found
is in Feynmann's recollection of his father's 'explanation' of his
son's 'ball-in-the-wagon' question. Feynmann doesn't use that
phrasing in his 'Lectures'.
So, I'm stumped, looking for other uses of the 'tends to' phrase in
the literature.
To me it seems to be a bit of a bone thrown to Aristotelian thinking.
Can (should) we try to remove the 'tends' from the statement of N1?