In his Principia, in the Motte translation, Scholium at p. 77, he writes of time, in order to remove "certain prejudices": “Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is called duration”.
In the Motte translation, p 506, Newton says: “... for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy."
Is it possible that he set aside the issue of time in order to work out the consequences of a absolute time axiom? That absolute time was for Newton a provisional hypothesis?
I am no Newton expert, but it sure seems from the passages you quoted that, though he didn‘t at first see absolute time as a provisional hypothesis, he could have come to doubt time’s absoluteness later in life.
In the event you are also interested in more recent approaches, you might find it amusing to check my own account as developed in the Appendix to my Aforismi 2019 (don’t worry, it’s in English) at pp. 113-ff., right here: Preprint Aforismi 2019
Niladri Das,
Thank you for adding a reply.
You wrote: What do you mean by absolute?
"Absolute" is not my wording, it is the wording chosen by Sir Isaac Newton, as quoted in the `discussion' following the question .
In modern terms, I think we would interpret that as: duration is the same regardless of the reference frame. Einstein's SR appears to have overturned the validity of that postulate.
According to Aristotle, time is a register of motions: if there were no motion there would be no time; if time is eternal it is because motion is eternal, not the other way around; that which does not move, i.e. the first mover (and nothing else), is timeless, everything else exists 'in time' and if a thing existing in time is at rest it is only relatively to other things; now is to time as point is to line; duration on its own does not exist, it is always duration of a change, and the change is delimited by two markers (nows).
. . . and because every now is the same in the entire universe, the duration of any change between two nows is the same everywhere, and so one can, for example, choose the rotation of the Earth around its axis as the reference change, call it 'day,' and use it as the unit of measurement of the duration of any kind of change whatsoever.
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