Isaac Newton's Notes Digitized 92
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."
not Goatse!!!! (Score:1)
Why, oh why....
Re:Link to the book (Score:4, Informative)
The interesting part of this release is not that book, but the notebooks, so the link in the story is correct.
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Ah, the golden age... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Ah, the golden age... (Score:5, Informative)
Eh, seeing how Newton was involved in one of the most famous IP-theft disputes in history this is more than a bit ironic.
don't let historical tedium get in the way (Score:2)
of a good 'back in the old days... things were better than they were today' cliche.
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nostalgia just isn't what it use to be.
Re:Ah, the golden age... (Score:5, Insightful)
He also became a significant political figure and sent more than a few people to the gallows. Not the sort of figure I'd want DMCA advocates knowing about, let alone emulating!
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As a politician he was about as insignificant as they get - his one speech in all his years as an MP was to ask for a window to be closed. It was as a bureaucrat that he had significant impact.
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The Apple falling (never on his head) was actually a story used in his IP Dispute with Leibniz over Calculus, it was argued that the Apple story (in his garden at home in 1666) proved that Newton was using Calculus before Leibniz said he invented it, and so Newton invented it independently and first ...
It was his way of dating prior art ...
Re:Ah, the golden age... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Yeah, it was so much better when the local bishop, who is family with the local nobility if not royalty, would excommunicate you, imprison you, or even torture/execute you for heresy because your scientific finds went against Catholic/christian doctrine.
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It seems that he held Arian beliefs, but with no particular association with Unitarianism. It appears that Unitarianism wasn't organized in England until after his death.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton's_religious_views [wikipedia.org]
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The link also leads to Socianianism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socinianism [wikipedia.org] and the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Church_in_Transylvania [wikipedia.org] founded in 1568.
While not formally established, the Unitarian literature and thought was known in England during his lifetime. You are correct that Lindley formed a chuch in England after Newton's death. Newton had many secret writings because of his interest in alchemy. It is possible he communicated with other Unitarians in his lifetime, but destroyed the commu
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...without worrying some lawyer will come pounding on your door...
Yes but they did have to worry about the church pounding on their door, ready to burn a heretic...
Light Reading? (Score:2)
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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!
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Maybe it was a pun, given that one of the works was all about optics. ;)
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17th century tho.
It doesn't matter (Score:2)
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.
Re:Light Reading? (Score:4, Funny)
Well, it depends on whether you view light as a wave or a particle.
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Categories & Pages? (Score:2)
> 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 ...
Re:Categories & Pages? (Score:4, Informative)
> 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.
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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 [wikipedia.org]
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Ha, yes. Newton, Liebnitz, William of Orange, all of that stuff. Learned it all from The Baroque Cycle. Nothing like fiction to teach you history! Oh, and we can't forget Lord Gy.
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCGd7ampITkC&pg=PT325
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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 i
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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
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Newton, Invented milled edge coins to stop people trimming the edges (when the metal in coins was actually worth something)
Spent most of his life researching esoteric alchemy and biblical numerology ... and most of his notes are to do with this and not physics ...
Re:Categories & Pages? (Score:5, Informative)
Luckily (Score:2, Informative)
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Re:Luckily (Score:4, Informative)
Newton spoke English (17th century English) and so his notes are in that ...but this is Pre-Johnson's Dictionary so there is no standard English and no standard spelling so he wrote in Lincolnshire/Cambridge English ...Because of this most published works were written in Latin which did have standard spelling and could read by most intellectual Europeans
good, but awkward interface (Score:5, Informative)
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.
govt contracting + libraries (Score:4, Insightful)
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'
Re:govt contracting + libraries (Score:5, Informative)
I'm one of the members of this project and this post has irked me (to say the least). I think what has bothered me most are the assumptions that the poster made.
The costs that the poster gave show no connection with the reality of academic funding in the humanities in the UK. We were generously funded by JISC and two anonymous donors (for whose support we are extremely grateful) - the total funds were approximately 0.00125% of the 8 billion.
All the work was done in-house by what amounted to less than three full-time positions working for nine months. Approximately half were responsible for digitising/encoding the materials (images and XML) and 1.5 full-time position's worth of work was involved in the development of the front and backends for the project - all of which are based on open-source software.
More importantly, these materials are all open access. The Newton Project (http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk) has been releasing its materials as open access resources for over a decade. This was _before_ UK HE funding bodies made it a requirement.
you mad bro? (Score:2)
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 d
You can do that. (Score:2)
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.
It's worth noting... (Score:2)
...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 or
sources of solid information (Score:2)
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 [google.co.uk]) was widely reviewed as a good scientific biography. The biographer more or less admitted that he was somewhat hostile towards his subject but eve
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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. Al
digitizing such a damaged copy of the printed book (Score:3, Informative)
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 [gallica.bnf.fr])!
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http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3363w/f7.zoom.r=.langEN [gallica.bnf.fr] appears to work properly for me.
They use tiled sub-images to avoid you downloading the image files.
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Scratch that you can get the full images - http://gallica.bnf.fr/proxy?method=R&ark=bpt6k3363w.f8 [gallica.bnf.fr]
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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.
Awesome (Score:4, Informative)
There have been a number of other notable manuscript digitization projects of late:
British Libraries Digitised Manuscripts
http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/ [www.bl.uk]
"Homer Multitext" - several manuscripts including Venetus A
http://www.homermultitext.org/ [homermultitext.org]
The Archimedes Palimpsest
http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/ [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). [loc.gov])
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...
way, way out there (Score:3)
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.
Using a Creative Commons license (Score:3)
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...
Re:Using a Creative Commons license (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not ok with it. I find it extremely offensive.
The funding was already provided, by a donation of 1.5 GBP, so all the costs have already been covered. Work funded by the public should be in the public domain, and I think that should be made a law. Additionally, it's public domain content, which IMO should be illegal to restrict.
It's fundamentally unethical to take public money and then double-charge the public by putting restrictions on the result.
Trying to read Principia was hard enough (Score:2)
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 protectio
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Don't know if you will find this surprising, but Newton really did stare the Sun unprotected...
http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/GF/vision/others.html [sdsu.edu]
No mentions of Daniel Waterhouse or Enoch Root? (Score:1)
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*?
Principia is in Latin (Score:3)
Re:Principia is in Latin (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, well, he had plenty of time to learn Latin since he didn't have to take Calculus in high school!
Re:Principia is in Latin (Score:5, Funny)
It's not fucking funny because fucking Newton did not invent fucking calculus. FUCK YOU!
Regards,
G. Leibniz
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Re:Principia is in Latin (Score:4)
Of course he wrote it in Latin - Latin was the standard language for academic discourse in his time, and as an educated man he was expected to know it and use it in his published works. The big advantage of this was that it made it relatively easy for him to communicate with his counterparts in other countries - for instance, Gottfried Leibniz also wrote mostly Latin.
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and slashdotted (Score:1)
Principia: the most important thing in history (Score:2)
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 te
Darwin's work is equal, at least (Score:2)
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.
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Number of Universal Laws (Universally applicable Scientific theories) before Newton : None
There were precursors to gravitation that were about before him, and others might have applied them to objects on Earth, or in space, his great leap was seeing they could apply to both ...
It changed the universe from "on earth and in heaven" to "everywhere" ...
I read this as nose (Score:2)
Seriously, I was so confused. Had to take a triple take before I realised.
"too fragile to be scanned"?! (Score:2)
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.