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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?
It helps if you were brought up reading prose.
Like, totally forsooth and verily, dude!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Maybe it was a pun, given that one of the works was all about optics. ;)
> 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 ...
Yes. He was warden of the Royal Mint and had a great impact on modern coinage, but you don't hear a lot about that.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
17th century tho.
The interesting part of this release is not that book, but the notebooks, so the link in the story is correct.
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'
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)!
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.
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
Well, it depends on whether you view light as a wave or a particle.
May the Maths Be with you!
You're more likely to see a recipe for Apple Pie...
We show geeks how to get their dream girl at EyesOfOdessa.com
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.
Newton was a prolific writer and wrote more on theology than anything else (he was a theologean as well as a scientist, alchemist, etc), one example is that he wrote almost a million words looking for meaning in the numerology of 666, including a 6X6 magic square that contained only primes and summed to 666 on each row, column, and diagonal. He also claimed that "Jesus was sent to Earth to operate the levers of gravity". He is remebered for his undeniable genius in science, most of his other writings are (by modern standards) the ramblings of a madman.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Unless you're like me and got through The System of the World. I wonder how many other slashdotters can attribute 90% of what they know about Newton to Neal Stephenson?
I thought I had a vague idea of Newton's clinical shyness, but Stephenson's picture is vastly more informative and interesting. No idea how truly accurate it is, but I'd guess quite a bit.
Highly recommend reading if you haven't: The Baroque Cycle
www.sci-ku.com
Yes, that would be a real treat to see a sketch of the Mona Lisa in there. Let me know when you find it.
Debunking isn't necessarily the same thing as criticizing the workings. Plenty of theory holds up even after a person has had their knuckles rapped and told to go through the calculations again. (Black hole evaporation was discovered by such a process.) The problem with Newton (and, indeed, Einstein) is that there are questions of originality. Einstein was well-aware of spacetime theory prior to coming up with relativity, for example. Newton was well-aware of prior work on laws of motion and on calculus. All three things are correct, so no work is getting debunked. Both Einstein and Newton did original work on top of whatever they borrowed, so neither person is being debunked. The only question is what did they know and when did they know it.
Newton is particularly troublesome, in this regard, as it is firmly established that he caused the suicide of a fellow member of the Royal Acadamy through extreme libel. Sorry, but the only "nut" in that case was Newton himself.
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)
nostalgia just isn't what it use to be.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Even the devotion to alchemy. It was the chemistry of his day, and promised the best understanding of chemical interactions available. That it was based on an impossible goal (transmutation of elements via chemical reactions) doesn't mean there was nothing worth studying. Quite a few of the elements were discovered by alchemists, and modern chemistry came from alchemy.
Not a sentence!
Quicksilver, bah. Having invested in reading the first half of the book I had just started to enjoy the characters when he suddenly shifts gears to modern times. You see I'm actually interested in Newton and Co and not just as plot devices. I was annoyed enough to stop reading.
And while I do think Snow Crash is immensely clever in an intellectual sense, it is also tainted with postmod silliness (a samurai-sword wielding pizza delivery boy is more suited to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). Also Stephenson is not a great prose stylist which is something I demand from a writer (Quicksilver looked more mature in that regard). Gibson's work is better prose and few scifi novels have broken ground like Neuromancer did.
How's that meme again? Oh yeah, let the holy wars begin.
Modern times? I think you may be partaking in the Confusion. The periods covered in Quicksilver are Old Daniel Waterhouse era (circa 1700, I think) and Young Daniel Waterhouse era (e.g. 1666).
Anyway, I'm inclined to agree with you about the prose style - but I find he's improving.
I recently read Reamde and I thought that it was very well written, very polished, while Cryptonomicon had some rough edges. Of course, YMMV - I tend not to be very discerning in that regard, if the story holds my interest.
As for holy wars, I'll leave that to others. I like both Stephenson and Gibson.