Am I understanding this passage correctly?

Question

... accordingly we find Newton assigning to God two very important and specific duties in the daily cosmic economy. For one thing, he actively prevents the fixed stars from collapsing together in the middle of space. This is not taught in the Principia; Newton there had confined himself to observing that in order to prevent such a collapse God had set these stars at immense distances from one another. Of course, this expedient would hardly suffice through all the ages of time, hence the reader of Newton is surprised that his author nowhere cites this difficulty as a reason for not imputing gravity to matter beyond the reach of our experimental observations: if the fixed stars do not gravitate, obviously there is no problem. We discover, however, that Newton implicitly thinks of them as possessing gravity,

This is a passage from Edwin Arthur Burtt's The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science

According to my understanding, there should be no 'not' (that I highlighted in bold text), in the passage above, because Newton is attributing gravity to fixed stars, not the other way round. Or am I understanding it wrong?

Answer 1

You are reading it wrong and it is not a typographical error, although it is a complicated construction.

Burtt observes that there are two ways you could resolve the problem that stars which appear close to each other visually from Earth do not crash into each other as a result of gravity.

The first is that they are far from each other and only appear close because we can't resolve their distance from Earth with the naked eye, only their angle relative to the observer (which is what Newton concluded).

The second is that stars don't have gravitational fields even though everything that we observed does (which is a possibility that Newton did not consider) because different laws of nature apply to stars than to other things that we observed.

Burtt makes the observation that Newton didn't even consider the second possibility even though it was logically another possible solution that could resolve his observations, and even though there was no experimental way to determine which of the two possibilities was correct. He expresses this view by stating that:

the reader of Newton is surprised that his author nowhere cites this difficulty as a reason for not imputing gravity to matter beyond the reach of our experimental observations: if the fixed stars do not gravitate, obviously there is no problem.