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Émilie du Châtelet
Poco dopo la scomparsa di Émilie, Voltaire scrisse:
Je n'ai pas perdu une maîtresse mais la moitié de moi-même.
Un esprit pour lequel le mien semblait avoir été fait.
Her most recognized achievement is her translation of and commentary on Isaac Newton's book Principia containing basic laws of physics. The translation, published posthumously in 1759, is still considered the standard French translation today. Her commentary includes a profound contribution to Newtonian mechanics—the postulate of an additional conservation law for total energy, of which kinetic energy of motion is one element. This led to her conceptualization of energy as such, and to derive its quantitative relationships to the mass and velocity of an object.
