College Notebook of Isaac Newton
cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk
cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk
This example[2] generates a 4898×7711 png compared to a 1270×2000 jpg from the download link[3].
[1]: https://github.com/lovasoa/dezoomify
[2]: https://ophir.alwaysdata.net/dezoomify/dezoomify.html#https:...
[3]: https://images.lib.cam.ac.uk/content/images/MS-ADD-03969-001...
"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."
This article has more: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098
My apologies, here is the article and citation. And no, not the reciprocal Pythagorean theorem -- learning about Pythagoreanism is a real rabbit hole, highly recommended :)
McGuire, J. E., & Rattansi, P. M. (1966). Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan’. Notes and records of the Royal Society of London, 21(2), 108-143.
Although by some accounts Newton could be pretty nasty, a quick look at this almost makes me feel sorry for him given the advancement of his mind versus the state of knowledge at the time. Perhaps though he was in his element at that time, when so much was up for grabs.
Saw the hand and that immediately became my favorite thing in the notebook.
I love how simple-yet-not-too-simple it is.
> Thomas Pynchon parodies this punctuation mark in his novel Gravity's Rainbow by depicting a middle finger, rather than an index finger, pointing at a line of text.
> At which time I found that method of Infinite series. And in summer 1665 being forced from Cambridge by the Plague I computed the area of the Hyperbola of Boothby in Lincolnshire to two & fifty figures by the same method. [signed] Is. Newton
He made a signed statement of his discovery just as in a 20th century engineer's/inventor's notebook.
The mention of being forced from Cambridge because of the plague makes me wonder if some great discoveries are being made right now because many bright minds have been forced home by coronavirus.
The y^e form was apparently used for the King James Bible in 1611 so it's plausible it might still have been a normal way of writing "the" as late as 1650, rather than as an affectation or abbreviation.
Edit: He also uses y^t for that which I hadn't noticed at first glance.
Its opened on a page titled ‘Otiose et frustra expensa’ (Idle and vain expenses) where he lists his snack binges (including ‘cheries’, ‘Tarte’, ‘Marmolet’, ‘Custardes’, and ‘Cake bred).
[0] https://mss-cat.trin.cam.ac.uk/manuscripts/uv/view.php?n=R.4...
I bet writers of children's stories had a hard time explaining Euler too.
But somehow they managed to insert Einstein into the public imagination. And almost no one I know understands the photoeletric effect or the theory of relativity. I myself have the vaguest of understandings.
It's not that gravity was a new concept or anything. In fact, it goes back so far in our history that we still use the silly name "gravity" for the phenomenon; it was once though to be a property of an object or an element (in the "four elements" sense), and was opposed by another property called "levity". You will note that there is no current theory of levity. Galileo had already put numbers to gravity on Earth by that point, and the idea that the force holding things in their orbits acted according to an inverse square law was circulating before Newton got there. (There's no reason to believe he couldn't have come to that conclusion independently, but there's no reason to credit it to him either.)
What was missing was the connection; the generalization. That's not obvious in any way. How do you get an inverse square law to work with Galilean gravity? It smacks of equants and deferents until you find a way to put the effective mass of a body, such as the Earth, at its centre. Imagine a world in which there's some inverse square force thingy holding the moon and planets in their orbits, and there's gravity and you know how that works, and nobody has even the slightest notion that they're in any way related. And then you have the OFFS moment.
I thought that that was only mentioned in parodies of Newton.
e.g. https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/363707/view/caricature-of...
The apple falling on his head seems to have been a later embellishment.
In any case, regardless of whether Newton's recollection of his own experiences was mistaken or confected, this is not a myth in the normal sense of being the product of invention or misconstrual by others long after the event.
1. Galileo performed experiments related to gravity by dropping objects from a certain tower in Pisa.
2. Newton "discovered gravity" with the apocryphal Apple story.
Interesting, isn't it, that Galileo died in 1642, while Newton wasn't born until 1643? Sir Isaac would have had to have been a time traveller.
That's the narrative, anyways. Of course, the people telling the narrative have success in telling the narrative, not the actual success!
The text is extremely readable and understanble, even for a non-mathematician like me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_stud...
The ancient Greeks gave us the name "atom," the indivisible unit. The alchemists chased the goal of breaking down base metals (splitting the atom) and transmuting the components into gold. Then in the 20th century, the physics were finally mapped out. The atom was split, unveiling the subatomic world, and we know full well that atoms can be fused. The term "transmutation" is even used.
It's like an ancient quest finally reached a conclusion, albeit not in the convenient way they would have hoped.
> Oppenheimer later recalled that, while witnessing the explosion, he thought of a verse from the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad Gita:
> "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one."
I'm fond of mythopoetic perspectives on technology, to find parallels in texts from the antiquities or the Renaissance.
From their point of view, we in the modern world must seem to live like magicians, communicating over vast distances, peering into our "looking glass".
His mathematical pursuits were an afterthought, certainly not what took up the vast majority of his time which was alchemy.
There is a lot we still don't know and the tendency to condense and distort is everpresent, but the facts are a lot more interesting than the oversimplifications one usually encounters in modern books about Newton's alchemy.
For instance, the focus tends to lie on alchemical transmutation (which is erroneously equated with making gold) rather than Newton's worldview (intensely religious) and philosophy (alchemical). That Newman has cheekily renamed alchemy to chymistry in his output, reinforces the fact that a specific agenda is being pushed rather than an attempt made to acquire holistic understanding.
Whenever I mention the likes of Newton and their works, I frequently get attacked by some people. Their argument is that Newton was a terrible human being and despite his contributions to Science, Mathematics, and the process of discoveries in general, he does not deserve praise since appraisal implies we would be condoning his behavior.
To that I usually reply, we would never accept some of his behaviors now and that does not mean his contributions are worthless. They believe we can never separate the "works" from a "person", to which I always disagree.
EDIT: Grammar.
The thing is if we were only taking into account the contributions of saints according to contemporary moral standards, we would have empty libraries. If we're into building some comforting society in which human beings aren't complex, don't have flaws, don't make mistakes and there's an inherent morality in whatever you accomplish just because it's you who's done it (this decade's favourite non sequitur), well I'd say that's teen brain modal logic if I ever saw one and then excuse me, but I'll be protecting those libraries brimming with stuff written by evil evil people, because a world where that exists is more valuable to me than any project of safe paradise where it doesn't.
I lament atheism, even as an atheist, for the idea that only the Gods (or God) can pass judgement on the human soul is a useful idea. When nothing is sacred, every thing and person is subject to useless and pointless posthumous destruction for there is nothing to naturally curtail the hubris that we can pass judgement on all who ever lived even when we are in fact, not objectively morally superior to our forebears and even if we were, we don’t possess the means to make that determination. The dead are gone, but we still use them to distract us from our lives rather than take what is useful and discard what is not.