The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia
thonyc.wordpress.com
thonyc.wordpress.com
Why don't we have coffee houses like this today? I'd go. You could argue that the web is the modern-day version of this, but I've never heard of such coffee houses in the decades years immediately before the web (1970s, 80s, 90s), so it's not like the web displaced them. EDIT: To be clear, I don't think the web is good replacement. So I'm puzzled why we don't have these kind of coffee houses anymore.
What would you say to a coffee shop, open late, with intelligent speakers, animal exhibits, autopsies[1], science experiments, all kinds of talks, painting lessons, something different every night, lots of random and interesting things to try and rekindle the intellectual coffee shop of old England?
[1] Well maybe not this one, but a Victorian-era coffee shop actually did do some public autopsies.
No, I disagree. The web is not a replacement for normal social interaction. Zoom is not a replacement for in person meetings. The web does not replace an actual coffee shop, and social media or email does not replace a phone call.
Unfortunately, our newest adult generation will never understand what beauties there were in life before people only communicated electronically.
It’s unfortunate, because the raw improvised social interaction of recent eras past is forever gone, and the newer generations will never know what they missed.
And its not either or. You can have both side by side or just one or the other. It depends on your Personality type and Needs.
We are born unconscious of both. And take time to learn them. And learning about the needs and personality types of others and realizing there is a huge spectrum that has nothing to do with yours takes even longer.
So making contact with Beauty is never confined to how someone else did it. Its good to be aware of all the routes though. And sample as many as you can.
Pandemic aside, our "newest adult generation" still can meet in real life. But they are now able to take advantage of both electronic and face-to-face communication with a level of expertise older generations don't have, and better manage potential distractions.
I don't worry about them, not on that subject anyways. They are perfectly able to understand the beauties in life, like every human did since humans existed. It is just that times change and people adapt.
> Electronic communication allows you to communicate with the specialist in your field
Which makes it less likely you will communicate with someone closer to your level. The specialist will be inundated, whereas perfectly fruitful conversations with merely competent/slightly expert people will not happen. You are a lot more likely to know the famous experts than you are to know very good people in the field who are right in your (or any) backyard. A dense network of communications will likely generate better ideas than those centered around very few specialists.
> It is constantly available thanks to smartphones.
Time sink spent on sites like the Math stackexchange, etc at all possible hours. With a coffee house, you have a dedicated time, and you cannot utilize it outside of those few hours. This frees up your mind to ponder and create. With "constantly available", you can spend all your time on it.
> If you have a great idea, you can share it immediately,
This is a huge problem for two reasons: 1. It leads to way too many false positives. I reckon most such ideas are flawed, and you would have discovered the flaws if you had waited a few hours/days to share it. 2. Spending the time to curate your idea, formulate it well, etc is much more effective than simply messaging out your half baked idea (even if the idea is a good one).
> You can ask question and get answer within seconds when you are working on your subject.
This is the same anti-feature and is why when I worked in teams where we were colocated, I would keep my IM off at work (sometimes for months at a time). If people wanted to talk to me, they could email me if it's not urgent otherwise they would have to walk to my cube and interrupt me (I don't mind these interruptions). This worked well for 2 reasons: 1. They are much more conscious of interrupting me, so they will think more before deciding to interrupt me. 2: Just that extra physical motion of getting up and walking would be enough for their brains to figure out the solution on the way to my cube.
You could very well argue that some people have the discipline and skills to manage all the problems above. In my experience, they are in a minority, and a smaller proportion of the population can/will manage them compared to the old days.
> But they are now able to take advantage of both electronic and face-to-face communication with a level of expertise older generations don't have, and better manage potential distractions.
Very much disagree on "better manage potential distractions." We have an order of magnitude more distractions, and looking around I see that most people are doing a very poor job of managing them.
Many other places will try to get you out after you finished your drink and they want you to finish the drink fast. This means instead of being social places of interaction where additionally you can get a coffee many modern cafés have become places of consumption that you should leave rather fast unless you are consuming continuously.
It's called the pub.
It is socially acceptable to shoot the shit with complete strangers at a bar, especially if you're at the bar on a stool; less so between tables where it's usually a group of friends that are gathered.
More generally: people go to these types of establishments often to meet friends, so it is generally impolite to intrude on their conversation.
Again: less so at a bar.
I'd love a place to drink good coffee or tea and talk about politics, philosophy, science, technology, literature...etc with strangers.
The average person seems to have no large stretches of idle time. Neither did the people who built the pyramids, I guess. What are we doing?
If you killed the Internet after work, and did not have a TV, do you think you would suddenly have larger stretches of idle time?
I reckon if one is willing to sacrifice those two today, they could have much idle time. I knew at least one chronically homeless person for whom I think this is a barrier to getting back to a normal life. Idle time is addictive. I don't think he became homeless decades ago to gain more idle time, but he did get accustomed to it.
I think this gets to the heart of it. The people hanging out in the cages in the article were not the average person. They were almost invariably well-to-do people who didn't need to work for a living. Free time and some security from harm against potential failures (or wastes of time) are two ingredients for innovation. The majority of our technological innovators come from priveleged backgrounds, for that reason (in addition to money granting them access to the right education, networks and technology).
(to what degree was the coffee shop the public-access commercially-supported more hands-on version of the salon?)
On Monday nights for god knows how long they have had jazz nights on the inside and open mic nights on the outside. Not mathematical and scientific pursuits, but the greatest art I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing being created before my eyes And to me that makes it a place of intellectual pursuits (I’ve always called it the future of culture).
Just as an example I believe Marylin Manson had his official debut at churchill’s. I once watched a kid (wouldn’t be surprised if he was 17 and still in high school) walk up on stage in a dress with a harmonica and guitar...and I’d swear he’d give bob dylan a run for his money. And in all likelihood no one will even know this kids name or be moved/influenced by his music. One of the important things to take away from this article is the reality Newton was in his 40’s before he was “discovered“ living in near isolation as a unregarded professor and it was by happenstance Newton became Sir Newton (having already solved a problem his peer happened to be discussing and the challenge issued).
My insight would actually be these types of groups are everywhere, getting together and discussing and pursuing their passions with other likeminded people, it’s just unless you share the same passion or they are lucky enough to be discovered and transcend to be embraced by society at large they will simply be lost to history like Newton might have been.
Be the change you want to see in the world, I’d start maybe by going to a local university (covid may complicate this) and personally invite a number of professors from various fields to the campus bar for an open mic night. MC it but don’t put any restrictions, if they want to talk about work fine, if they want to read their own poetry fine, I think you’ll be surprised how quickly people in such an environment will share their unknown and undiscovered talents.
Over the years, I have bumped into fellow Hacker Newers in all of these places.
I didn't realize how spoiled we must be here in Miami (but not at the moment). Thanks for the reminder, throwaway!
I can tell you where the scientists are. They are sitting in their offices writing the next grant application. And if they aren't, going to hang out at the coffee shop with other scientists is not a line item on their CV that contributes towards their tenure application.
At the risk of opening up the standard argument about the quality of the endings in Stephenson's books, I thought that the [spoiler-omitted: technology] conclusion of the third book in the cycle, although not particularly dramatic, is an excellent counterpart to the [spoiler-omitted: superstition] beginning of the first book.
Here's a translated quote from the novel 三国演义, per Wikipedia:
"Brothers are like limbs, wives and children are like clothing. Torn clothing can be repaired; how can broken limbs be mended?"
Coffee culture and all the other bits of innovation and turmoil of the Enlightenment. Church vs State, Kings vs Commerce.
This epic fiction was completed some time in 2004, Tulips and Beanie Babies had crashed hard but there was far more coffee yet to drink, and junk residential mortgages had yet to destroy the world...
The characters of 1700 trying to make sense of this new thing called "money", its first derivative called "currency", and ever more abstruse instruments "bank notes" (what is a bank?). Mutual shares in associations of investors of "insurance", "corporations", or even trade in those things to form "stock markets".
And here you are, trying to explain the blockchain to your Mom.
I have seen this environment at a small university town where I used to live. You overhear all sorts of interesting conversations ranging from the middle school kids who walk there after school to professors researching antibiotic resistance.
> Newton had delivered up a mathematical proof that an elliptical orbit would be produced by an inverse square force situated at one of the foci of the ellipse, thus combining the inverse square law of gravity with Kepler’s first law.
Then, the source quote from Newton's Principia: "For Pythagoras, as Macrobius avows, stretched the intestines of sheep or the sinews of oxen by attaching various weights, and from this learned the ratio of the celestial harmony. Therefore, by means of such experiments he ascertained that the weights by which all tones on equal strings .. were reciprocally as the squares of the lengths of the string by which the musical instrument emits the same tones. But the proportion discovered by these experiments, on the evidence of Macrobius, he applied to the heavens and consequently by comparing those weights with the weights of the Planets and the lengths of the strings with the distances of the Planets, he understood by means of the harmony of the heavens that the weights of the Planets towards the Sun were reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the Sun."
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.1966.001...
https://www.jstor.org/stable/228080?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_...
https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2020/03/annus-tran...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_mirabilis
I like to imagine that someone somewhere is currently immersed in their own annus mirabilis and the fruits of those discoveries will be a silver lining to this terrible pandemic.
Hooke was the "techie" who could actually engineer and build many of the experiments in the Royal Society. As founding member, he was made "chief curator", responsible for producing the empirical demonstrations.
"Hooke who, as Curator of Experiments of the Royal Society, was supposed "to furnish the Society every day [they met once a week] with three or four considerable experiments"
"The registers of the Royal Society testify to the eagerness with which Hooke hurried from one inquiry to another with brilliant but inconclusive results. Among those which early engaged his attention were the nature of the air, its function in respiration and combustion, specific weights, the law of falling bodies, the improvement of land-carriage and diving bells, methods of telegraphy and the relations of barometrical readings to changes in the weather. He measured the vibrations of a pendulum two hundred feet long attached to the steeple of St. Paul; invented a useful machine for cutting the teeth of watch-wheels; fixed the thermometer zero at freezing-point of water; and ascertained (in July I664) the number of vibrations corresponding to musical notes"
kind of like 2020.