Robert Boyle’s to-do list (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Robert Boyle’s to-do list (2010)

blogs.royalsociety.org

68 pointstosh29 comments

That's a fantastic find. Interesting how some of these we now take for granted and some we shall likely never have. Modest ambitions too! My own todo list is a bit less interesting.

The one that jumped out to me as likely unattainable was "A Ship not to be Sunk", as much on the wishlist then as now and so much harder to achieve than to talk about that I think it will be forever beyond our reach. Oceans are fierce.

At the time, it must have sounded of similar complexity or attainability as a ship to sail with all winds, but motor boats have been a solved issue for ages now, but ships can still sink.

> Pleasing Dreams and Physicall Exercises by the Egyptian Electuary and by the Fungus mentioned by the French author.

anybody know what "the Egyptian Electuary" and "the Fungus mentioned by the French author" is? and who is the french author

Maybe this guy? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233679918_Robert_Bo...

There's something about the story that is famiilar to students of modern VC-funded flim-flam:

https://blog.oup.com/2014/04/georges-pierre-des-clozets/

"A Perpetual Light". There we have limitless options: photovoltaics, radioluminescence, piezoelectricity. And are even on the cusp of inertial containment of fusion reactions.

How astounding to be able to reach back in time and pluck out a Newton or a Boyle or a Faraday, and plop them onto a jet airplane ride in the early 21st century! Space exploration, quantum teleportation, time dilation, gene manipulation. The doctrinaire scientific orthodoxy of our day must appear absolutely heretical to their minds.

Seems like the fungus might do it:

"Potent Druggs to alter or Exalt Imagination, Waking, Memory, and other functions, and appease pain, procure innocent sleep, harmless dreams, etc." And "Pleasing Dreams and physicall Exercises exemplify’d by the Egyptian Electuary and by the Fungus mentioned by the French Author."

Do we have any idea what, specifically, the Egyptian electuary or the fungus were?

An excellent find.

Most of the rest I can understand, but this one has me stumped:

"The Attaining Gigantick Dimensions."

Are we talking large humans, turning people into giants? Did 'Gigantick' mean something different back then?

Turning humans into giants would fit with the ambition of the rest of the items.

In the old world gyant (gigantick was to be gyant like) wasn't necessarily limited to how we tend to use giant-like to mean purely stature. It could be in stature, but also in cultural or spiritual 'power'. Offspring of gods and Nephilim were talked of as being gigantes in Greek but often it was in strength and agressive nature and not stature.

The addition here, however, of dimensions means that he was using it as we'd expect, yes.

Or 'Fields of the Nephilim', giants of prog-goth, as well as the sole exemplars?

It was submitted a couple times in the past.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=boyle+list

There are lots of valuable links that never gained traction.

"There are lots of valuable links that never gained traction."

Content is king, there's probably a great website to be made {hoover|dyson|vacuum}ing up amazing lost links.

A daily “Best of Missed HN”

What a great idea.

Weekly would be better

The Nautilus article on the same list [1] suggests that Boyle may have been referring to architecture - building structures larger . I interpret it as humans being able to leave a large mark on the universe, and I think we've achieved it and are improving on that ability. The man had a fantastic imagination, but I wouldn't be surprised if he imagined 50-foot men digging canals with this statement.

Boyle would have been familiar large structures like Old St. Paul's Cathedral, whose spire stretched to almost 150m high, or the HMS Britannia, a 51m 1620-ton ship. These and other projects would have been completed with manpower and horsepower: 80kg, 100 watt men and 500kg, 700-watt horses doing work. I think Boyle may have been imagining 8,000 kg, 10,000 watt men doing the same, and been unable to imagine an 80 kg man sitting in a machine that did the work.

I think that would have been checked off his list if his life had been prolonged long enough to see factories, trains, and equipment operating by steam power. It would the 800m Burj Kalifa or a 333m 100,000 ton Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, effected not by men pulling on ropes but by gigantick hydraulic heavy equipment. A person can pull a lever and lift more than a thousand tons with a crane, or dig up cubic meters of earth effortlessly. And I don't know if anyone has ever effected more useful power than a Saturn V launch, which projected humanity's reach out to the moon, and the Voyager missions have subsequently reached out to 22 billion km and are currently adding 17 kilometers to that number every second.

[1]: http://nautil.us/blog/has-science-realized-this-350_year_old...

The Emulating of Fish without Engines by Custome and Education only.

Could someone explain what this means?

Swimming?

Didn't people swim then?

Freediving

First on the list:

“The Prolongation of Life.”

He’d probably be disappointed that we’ve gained so much knowledge and have made no progress on this.

That depends on how you look at it. You could also call it a great success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#/media/File:Li...

That mixes the massive improvements in child mortality rates with the modest improvement in "age of mortality when child mortality is excluded".

Sure, but all of these children got to live a full life instead of dying early, so "prolongation of life" applies there as well. A job well done, time to cross it off the to-do list? :)

Nope, from his second item on the list, I’d say you missed his point.

“ The Recovery of Youth, or at least some of the Marks of it, as new Teeth, new Hair colour’d as in youth.”

That's a different entry.

Yes, the next entry. it naturally follows.

First prolong life, next restore some aspects of youth.

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