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.'"
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.
Yeah, this is fascinating stuff, especially as I'm reading Quicksilver right now, in which are depicted "plausible recreations" of some early Society experiments in optics, chemistry, physics, and physiology, including a rather gruesome account of the live dissection of a dog.
Stephenson also breathes some life and character into historical figures associated with the Royal Society, not the least of whom are Newton and Leibniz. Worth a read if you have any interest in the history of science.
I can see the fnords!
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.
"... 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
including a rather gruesome account of the live dissection of a dog.
A live dissection is also known as a vivisection. It is derived from the Latin term meaning, to cut life: “Vivis” (life) and “Sectus” (to cut).
Get your free Dropbox account with 2 GB Free storage!
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
A live dissection is also known as a vivisection. It is derived from the Latin term meaning, to cut life: “Vivis” (life) and “Sectus” (to cut).
<pedant>
vivus "alive" => vivi-
seco "to cut" => sectio(n)-
</pedant>
(The words you give aren't exactly incorrect, they're just a weird choice of forms)
I'm very use to typing Quakers (correct spelling). Forgive the muscle memory induced typo.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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.