Slashdot Mirror
Royal Society Releases Historic Science Papers
krou writes "To celebrate its 350th anniversary, the Royal Society has released a number of historic science papers and made them available online via its Trailblazing website. Among the papers are Benjamin Franklin's notes on his kite-flying experiment, a paper on black holes co-written by Professor Stephen Hawking, manuscripts from Sir Isaac Newton showing 'that white light is a mixture of other colours,' and a few other interesting details such as 'a gruesome account of a 17th century blood transfusion.'"
"a gruesome account of a 17th century blood transfusion."
Bring on the twilighters!!!
...Neal Stephenson a trip. Does the site contain any papers about the benefits of drinking mercury?
If your only tool is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.
See, I told you my client, Galileo, isn't guilty!
Table-ized A.I.
You know what's cool about the web? Pages can contain hyperlinks to other pages! For example, if you write a post saying that Benjamin Franklin's notes on his kite-flying experiment are available on the web, you can use these fancy "hyperlinks" to help people find the articles!
Of course, it appears that the articles were already on the web, and the trailblazer website is just a very, very cool index of existing information. But, I think it's required that every slashdot summary contain at least one easily verified and incorrect fact, so that readers will be more engaged with the website and read more advertising.
Yeah, that rotten Isaac Newton admitted in an email that he drew the apple larger than scale to make the diagram easier to read. Blasted hippy-haired liberal!
Table-ized A.I.
Haven't you heard? Newtonian physics has been discredited after someone hacked into his quill and pen set.
STFU about slashdot bias.
I never saw that coming.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
This is really cool stuff, and I find it very interesting to scroll the timeline on Trailblazing to get an idea of the historical context of these papers. I just wish there were more than 60 of them and covering more fields. Still, I'm looking forward to reading Watson and Crick's paper, Gould and Lewontin's paper, and perhaps even Maxwell's paper if I can handle it.
I'm a really big fan of the Royal Society. They have so much high quality research available under Open Access, including any papers in Philosophical Transactions B (which I tend to get stuff from the most as my interests are more related to Biology) that are more than a year old. I'm looking forward to their 350th Anniversary Issue which comes out in 2 weeks under Open Access. It's looking to have some interesting articles. In fact, all of the things they are doing for their 350th anniversary are really cool. Check them out: http://royalsocietypublishing.org/site/authors/2010.xhtml
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Great, now I have to find out why, in the Benjamin Franklin text, all but the last S's in any word look like lower-case Fs.
"...a few other interesting details such as 'a gruesome account of a 17th century blood transfusion."
Great, that's what the internet needs. More "Twilight" slashfic...
Anyone got a light for my sig?
"... our ignorance of the Earth system is overwhelming and intensified by the tendency to favour model simulations over experiments, observation and measurement."
"We could find ourselves enslaved in a Kafka-like world from which there is no escape."
Could?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
And how many had the journals they were published in recategorized when they dared to question the received dogma of the day?
2009: Physics/Mathematics: On the slashdotting of the Royal Society ;-)
But seriously, this is fantastic to see! Amazing what's freely available if you have the time and inclination to learn (and the brains to filter out all the quakery!).
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Why the hell weren't these publicly available to begin with? I see the article says "put online"; what does that mean? Were they available, just limited to microfilm or something like that? I hope they were freely available before.
At least Benjamin Franklin has all his original data.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Discuss how consensus rules Science, and how to properly dispose of raw data?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The Royal Society really does typify the content led questioning society that the world used to be. By establishing a body (The Royal Society) with the express intention of enabling that form of dicussion it represented very much a broad view that facts were what moved society forward rather than opinions.
How far we have fallen from 200 years ago into a world where opinion matters more than facts and where its routine for big companies in particular to hide data that doesn't match the outcome that they want.
The current pieces around Climate Change are a great example as to how far we have fallen, people with zero background, training or experience in a field are claiming that their opinions are just as valid as someone who are studied a field for 20 years.
We have people questioning doctors and demanding antibiotics
We have people believing rubbish like homeopathy because their "opinion" is it works
We have presidents believing that FAITH in something (WMDs) is more important that actual facts
We have people questioning evolution because their FAITH says it isn't so
Hopefully in 100 years our great-grand-children will look back on this as the biggest era of deliberate human stupidy. Its not often the past is actually better but the basis of the Royal Society and indeed the society which it represented 200 years ago is a much more rational and measured one than the FoxNews driven debates of today.
I often think that Fox News would be firmly on the "gravity denier" side if it had been around at the time of Newton.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
At least Benjamin Franklin has all his original data.
That, to me, is the infuriating art of this whole climate-gate thing.
Falsifying results when the real data didn't match your hypothesis? Bad, but it happens. Science moves on.
Lining up "peers" for fraudulent peer review? Worse, but conspiracies never last.
But deleting the genuine data, data that I paid for with my tax dollars? There should be criminal charges.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If your only tool is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.
If your only tool is a screwdriver, the answer to every problem is "screw it". Apologies to Maslow.
FWIW, original is "To the man who only has a hammer in the toolkit, every problem looks like a nail." A. Maslow
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
But deleting the genuine data
There's an app for that.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Pfft Newton: A 15th century theologian who claimed that Jesus was sent to Earth to "operate the levers of gravity", stuck pins in his eyes to figure out the "nature of light", wrote close to million words on the numerology of 666, and snorted mercury fumes on the weekends.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I've looked over this archive (before Slashdot posted it), and I found several articles which were very interesting to me.
Leeuwenhoek's description of the "little animals" he saw with his early microscope (1677) -- this one is quite long and many entries are repetitive, but it is a detailed account of Leeuwenhoek's regular experiments and observations with microscopic life forms.
Surviving in a room heated to 260 degrees Fahrenheit (1775) -- this paper strikes me as absolutely incredulous in its claims; I did not know that people could survive such heat (I have not yet found any modern information supporting or disproving this claim, so information about this from a modern science perspective would be nice!).
I have a large backlog of papers which I would like to read, but which I cannot right now due to time constraints. I certainly would like to read more of these if I had the time to do so.
Bravo to the Royal Society for making these publicly accessible and easily explored. I now have an urge to read some of the early Philosophical Transaction papers not highlighted in Trailblazing.
As such they do make a very interesting and non-gruesome read. We have come a long way.
I also found the article itself to be remarkably readable in every aspect (language, spelling and fonts). I did not expect that at all, but then again I am not in the habit of reading 17th century English.
I thought the site was Flash, but it appears to be all javasacript and HTML, using jquery.
What about the fraud that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Iraquis, committed using YOUR tax dollars?
Tumbleweeds. Time to move on. Yay look at those cool cockpit camera viseos of afghanis being incinerated. They had it coming cos they deserved it, etc, etc
You must be the moron that modded down the Parent and GP posts.
What's the matter? You feeling backed into a corner because your prophets of doom turned out to be charlatans?
There are better ways to deal with you betrayal than to lash out at others. Perhaps you should seek counseling.
---
History of Science Feed @ Feed Distiller
(The words you give aren't exactly incorrect, they're just a weird choice of forms)
For the benefit of those of us who haven't studied latin but are interested in languages, what are the forms you've given? What are the forms OP has given? If those answers don't make it readily apparent, why are OP's choices weird?
Pfft Newton: A 15th century theologian who claimed that Jesus was sent to Earth to "operate the levers of gravity", stuck pins in his eyes to figure out the "nature of light", wrote close to million words on the numerology of 666, and snorted mercury fumes on the weekends.
Utter rubbish. Newton lived in the 17th & 18th Centuries.
Um... questioning authority is kinda the hallmark of science.
I understand what you're saying, but...
Well, challenging authority with evidence is the hallmark of science. In the past, the authority (i.e. power) was typically part of a religious institution. These days (this is how I interpret your parent post) people use opinion to challenge the authority of the scientific process (as distinct from the authority of individual scientists).
I think well-practised science has authority (over factual matters). Religion does not. But well-practised science challenges itself with evidence.
I think we can agree on something :)
"Utter rubbish. Newton lived in the 17th & 18th Centuries"
;)
I was talking about Frank Newton....
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I did not know that people could survive such heat
Bah. A decent sauna is around 200 degrees Fahrenheit, and is good for you. I've spend plenty of quarter-hours at this temperature. US sauna are all dialed pitifully low for insurance reasons.
260F is just enough hotter than 200F that it wouldn't be pleasant anymore, but certainly not lethal in the short term. Drink enough fluids to replace the sweat and you'll be fine.
Be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker. JG Ballard