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Isaac Newton's Notes Digitized
First time accepted submitter nhstar writes with an excerpt from an article in the Register: "If you're looking for a bit of light reading this holiday season, Cambridge University is here to help: they've digitized and made available online over 4,000 pages of the pioneering scientist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton's most important works. 'Anyone, wherever they are, can see at the click of a mouse how Newton worked and how he went about developing his theories and experiments,' Cambridge University Library's digitization manager Grant Young told the BBC."
Being able to develop theories, without worrying some lawyer will come pounding on your door, claiming you are infringing this copyright or that patent.
Dear Sir, it would pleasure us if you would cease and desist with observations on gravity as our client holds the patent on Apples Falling From Trees And Striking A Person Upon The Head. Should you continue with in your present direction we shall have you summoned to the King's Court and sort you out. Dewey, Cheatham & Howe, LLP
Of course they had their battles, who stole an idea from who, but it was usually sorted out with a lot of yelling and smearing of reputation, rather than getting solicitors involved.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Egads! How can you compare reading 16th century works to light?
> The remainder of the Newton papers, many concerned with alchemy, theology and chronology, were returned to Lord Portsmouth.
Anyone know how many pages did he spend on physics and how many did he spend writing the rest of the subjects?
Would be interesting to see his insights on what he thought about other subjects ...
Luckily they aren't in bleeding Latin. I got a hold of a Project Gutenberg copy of Principa and I open the PDF only to find that most of the words ended in 'us' and 'um'.
I write professional videogame reviews! http://www.digitallydownloaded.net/
As far as I can tell:
1. You can't link to a specific page in the archive, which makes sharing a bit tricky; and
2. You can't download full-resolution pages.
Still a useful resource to have, but it's a bit unfortunate that these kinds of digitization projects seem to always want to roll-their-own slightly opaque interface.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
of a good 'back in the old days... things were better than they were today' cliche.
Why, oh why....
The interesting part of this release is not that book, but the notebooks, so the link in the story is correct.
I wonder if you flip through it if you find things like an early sketch of the Mona Lisa. Should be fun to just spend some time with on a Sunday afternoon.
the masses: we need digitize our books. google is doing it, why cant we?
library admin: i understand. let me find a vendor.
vendor a: our product costs 5 billion
vendor b: our product cost 8 billion, but we will give you kickbacks
vendor c: our product cost 3 billion
library admin: dear management, i need 8 billion dollars
management: wow cool. so we can be like a real business right? ive always wanted to play business man and make a profit
library admin: yes, we will own copyright on all materials, and our special interface will provide centralized control so we can keep out the riff raff
hippie: but arent you a taxpayer funded institution whose job is to disseminate information as efficiently as possible?
management: have the hippie shot
library admin: consider it done
4 years later...
library admin + manager: press release! our new surfable hierarchy tiered book access gateway (SHiTBAG) allows students all over the country to improve their lea blah blah blah blah blah
oracle sales manager: so, we are looking at a 4 year contract, and that will be 50,000 seats, so basically we are looking at 10 billion dollars
libray admin: awesome. the more money i am in control of, the more power i have inside the bureaucracy. ps, can i get an invite to your sweet conference in boca this year?
users: what the fuck is this shit? java plugin has crashed? please set your JAVA HOME? what the fuck is JAVA HOME?
users buddy: nevermind all that, let me show you this thing called 'bit torrent'
...that according to the BBC, there was a lot of pushback against some of Newton's workings because they weren't very good. I've not studied the papers that are up enough to verify the accuracy of the BBC's claim but if there is any basis to the statements then this may damage Newton's place in history as it will give credence to the view that he "acquired" material from Huygens and Descartes on the grounds that if he didn't really grasp the material he was writing about then he was less likely to be the original author of it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Oh no, surely somebody will figure out how to summon an Archangel, and that'll move us right into Quantum 4!
My dreams of being an Echo of Homeline keep getting fainter and fainter.
It seems weird that they chose to digitize a printed copy of the Principia that had many of its pages so badly burnt away that they can't be read. There are better copies around even in the same library that could have been scanned. Perhaps the best scanned image of Newton's Principia is one that was put online by the Bibliotheque nationale de France (http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3363w.r=.langFR)!
Egads! How can you compare reading 16th century works to light?
The "light reading" remark was just sarcasm you've somehow missed. It doesn't matter what language anyway. Take a look at the handwriting. Primary school teachers have it easier.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
There have been a number of other notable manuscript digitization projects of late:
British Libraries Digitised Manuscripts
http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/
"Homer Multitext" - several manuscripts including Venetus A
http://www.homermultitext.org/
The Archimedes Palimpsest
http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/
Personally I think such projects are absolutely vital to the long term preservation of these manuscripts. Modern technology makes possible the duplication of these source documents in high fidelity facsimile (Taschen in particular has published a number of fascinating editions, including Blaeu's Atlas Maior - another example would be The Book of Michael of Rhodes from MIT Press). So often works survive only as a copy of a copy of a copy, and we are left to peer through the murky glass of multiple interpertations at the far distant original author's intent. (The current definitive edition of Euclid, for example, is available to us only because of a single surviving early copy in the Vatican's library (which so far as I know has not been digitized, unfortunately, except for a couple images here: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/vatican/math.html).)
We should be scanning and then printing many copies of these early works and depositing them in libraries around the world in order to help these early glimpses into our history survive (at least in SOME form, even if the originals are lost). Of course, multiple copies of the digital data is also very important, but we have no way of knowing how well digital data will survive on thousand-year time scales. Fingers crossed that we will see multiple volume facsimilie copies of Newton's notebooks (one volume for the facsimile, one for a modern translation ) on Amazon in the next few years...
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
If you really want your mind blown, take a look at some of Sir Isaac's alchemical writings which are included in these collections.
Old boy was into some way deep shit. Dude did. not. play. What I wouldn't give just to be able to buy him drinks and ask him questions for maybe twelve hours.
Seriously.
Plus, he had dealings, scientific and otherwise, with some very interesting characters.
You are welcome on my lawn.
according to the BBC, there was a lot of pushback against some of Newton's workings ... this may damage Newton's place in history...
There are plenty of nuts who are keen to get publicity by claiming to debunk Einstein, Newton, or almost anybody famous who will get them some attention.
'Never at Rest' by R S Westfall (http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3ngEugMMa9YC) was widely reviewed as a good scientific biography. The biographer more or less admitted that he was somewhat hostile towards his subject but even so there's plenty of solid information there.
Looks like they're using a non-commercial Creative Commons license for the images:
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC 3.0)
That trend seems to be popular when it comes to such efforts, and by and large I'm OK with it - preserving early manuscripts is not a zero cost operation, and the NC license allows the data to be distributed and made available for scholarship while still giving the holding institution the chance to recover some of the (usually non-trivial) expense of digitzation. Hopefully if they don't want to publish printed bound versions themselves they'll be willing to negociate with someone who is intersted...
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
I checked out a version from my local library just so I could try and read it for myself. This edition was a fairly recent translation from Newton's original work, which was in Latin, into modern day English. Even with that and with an advanced engineering degree and some study of orbital mechanics, I couldn't begin to grasp what he was saying. His mind worked on levels far above mere mortals. I can only imagine that reading his personal notes would be like staring into the face of the Sun without protection. He was an amazing individual, his devotion to alchemy not withstanding.
I've scanned Principia and I find no references to Daniel Waterhouse or Enoch Root, or the Salomonic Gold. Could Neal Stephenson been writing *fiction*?
I'm getting the sinking feeling that these guys, while smarter than the average person, were also better educated than we are. He is British and yet writes this complex tome in Latin. I got the same sinking feeling when reading The Leatherstocking Tales series by James Fenimore Cooper (Last of the Mohicans etc.). There are passages of French dialog that are not translated. Apparently, as an educated person, you are just expected to know French. My language requirement in college was satisfied by taking Fortran! I hang my head in shame.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Please tell me you are not mixing up Isaac Newton and Isaac Asimov.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
> Isaac Newton's Notes Digitized and slashdotted (already)
To the left of the image were links providing direct URLs for the specific page you were viewing, and a download link for the image. The site is down right now, so I can't check if they are full resolution or not.
The only complaint I had with the interface was that there were no navigation buttons in full page mode, and that it was a little slow to load pages, which considering that the site is down now was probably just a heavy load issue.
In the 200,000 years of human history the most import event occurred 325 years ago when Newton wrote Principia. The world changed more in the last 325 years than the preceding 200,000.
The lives of people in Newton's time where more like cavemen than modern men. Indeed many people effectively where cavemen in Newton's time. When Newton was a kid he went away to school. Because his school was five miles from his parents house! Do you live within five miles of your job? Or do you perhaps do a lot of telecommuting?
To be fair, the world was already changing and would have kept moving forward either way. But in the book "The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History" Newton came in second. (As you can guess, I think he was robbed.) Now, in the Newton section, the phrase "this accomplishment along would have put him in the 100" appeared about four times. Calculus was invented independently without him by Leibniz. From there it probably would have taken another 100 to 200 years for it to find itself applied to physics and have all of his laws rediscovered. So if Newton had not lived, you would not be on Slashdot right now.
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http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3363w/f7.zoom.r=.langEN appears to work properly for me.
They use tiled sub-images to avoid you downloading the image files.
Scratch that you can get the full images - http://gallica.bnf.fr/proxy?method=R&ark=bpt6k3363w.f8
Seriously, I was so confused. Had to take a triple take before I realised.
This isn't just any copy of the Principia. This is one of the two different versions (both in Camb. U Lib) that Newton annotated and edited as he was preparing for a new edition of the Principia. This makes it (them when the second one comes online) entirely unique and invaluable.
That might be how it works in the US, this however is the UK, the world is not like the US.
FTFA - "The university had to undertake conservation work on some of the manuscripts, which were considered too fragile to be scanned"?!
WTF, so a handful of guest researchers in white cotton gloves every are less prone to damage the manuscript than a single scan?!
I doubt that.
This was the best option. Scan (or photograph them) them and put them on the web.
Darwin's work is equal, at least, as it involves human history directly, and changed the peoples mind and views of themselves as an integral part of the whole that Newton described.
Newton was, of course, an important precursor, as were Linnaeus, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler etc.
first of all, it was a joke, so i didnt mean to harsh on you. i love all scanning projects. its the saviour of civilization (what is left of it).
But now that i have actually visited your site, i notice you are claiming copyright on the works of Isaac Newton, who died over 300 years ago. I don't know what kind of opyright law they have in the UK, but in the US all of this stuff would be, technically, public domain.
It is awesome to bring it to the public. on the other hand, where are the pdf files? Can you download it to your ipad? etc etc etc? No.
So, although my post was 'in jest', i hate to say that it is rooted in truth, even in your highly commendable and worthwhile, admirable project.