Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz | Hacker News Reader

Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz

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97 pointsGormisdomai40 comments

Hooke introduced the effects of cannabis (“an account of the plant”) to the Royal Society and sometimes I wonder about that. Consider this amazingly dramatic title:

“A General Scheme, or Idea of the Present State of Natural Philosophy, And how its Defects may be Remedied by a Methodical Proceeding in the Making Experiments and Collecting Observations whereby to Compile a Natural History, as the Solid Basis for the Superstructure of True Philosophy.”

(Try saying that title in one breath!)

When it comes to cybernetics— Hooke was a big fan of Cornelis Drebbel who designed and built the first cybernetic system (a self regulating oven) and a functional submarine (which produced oxygen by heating saltpetre), and a compound microscope, and chemical air conditioning, and the telescope that Galileo used to find the moons of Jupiter, and a perpetual motion machine based on harvesting barometric pressure changes, and…

Coincidentally yesterday I was reading the Cybernetics Wikipedia page and discovered the relation between it and Kubernetes.

I'm having a Baader-Meinhof effect moment right now :)

TFA says the author has been "trying to transcribe on and off for the past few months." It's a two-page letter in English. To save anyone else the bother (including TFA's author), I just sat down and wrote it all out:

https://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/disseminate/leibniz.html

The letter is basically Hooke saying: "Well, I can't convince anyone but you, Leibniz, that Wilkins' Universal Character is a cool idea. I think we'll have problems figuring out the medium (i.e. what the characters look like and so on), but that should all shake out during testing. What kind of testing? Well, we need a bunch of smart people to come up with a lot of true facts in different fields, all of which we can try writing down in this language. Do you know any smart people I could brainstorm some true facts with? If you were to send me some such people, that might get the ball rolling over here."

Now, "get a bunch of smart people together with Robert Hooke to come up with true facts in a wide variety of fields" sounds suspiciously like the founding idea of the Royal Society... but in fact the Royal Society seems to have been started already about 20 years earlier ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham_College_and_the_format... ), so I guess I don't know how this letter fits into the big picture there.

FWIW, John Wilkins (the Bishop of Chester mentioned in the letter) had been dead for nine years by the time this letter was written (1681).

Oh, the other weird thing about this is that even though the "external" catalog information on makingscience.royalsociety.org and the "internal" catalog information penned on page 2 of the letter both describe it as a letter written to Leibniz, and sent to Leibniz, the text of the letter itself refers to Leibniz only in third person, and refers to some other individual in the second person. But it does make (oblique) requests of Leibniz, e.g.

> I question not but Mr Leibnitz may have many of those specimens by him and therefore I doe heartily wish you could prevail wh him to Communicate some of those which would be a means to persuade severall yet incredulous of the possibility of such a Science.

I suppose it could have been written to Leibniz's personal secretary, or some such. If it weren't for all the catalog data I'd assume it was written to some close colleague of Leibniz instead. Anybody want to track down a plausible explanation/mechanism here?

I was going to bring up the same claim—of it being a "Letter, from Robert Hooke to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz". It's clearly not written with that intent.

While reading, I first took it to be a journal entry. The penmanship also supports this. But the second person "you" at the end is a confounding detail. A journal entry in the form of a letter to himself is possible, but doesn't seem plausible.

The word you've labelled "[deviate?]" in your copy is definitely not "deviate" in the manuscript. I'm certain that the first letter is "R", and the second to last letter probably a "d" followed by "e" (compare to "undenyable" and "persuade"). The letter following "R" could be "i", but really could be anything. It's unfortunate that it's not as straightforward as just crafting a regex and grepping at /usr/share/dict/words, because whatever Hooke meant, it's likely to be an archaic spelling. "Recede" spelled as "Ricede" works grammatically, but I don't think that's it, either.

FYI I agree with you on that word: letter by letter it looks to me like "Roeade", but I can't figure out what English word that would be, either.

UPDATE: I'm now convinced the word is indeed "recede," and have updated the transcript accordingly. While we no longer speak of a singular person as "receding" from a position or principle, that was apparently a set phrase in the 17th and 18th centuries:

https://archive.org/search?query=%22recede+from+these+princi...

Thank you for doing this!

> come up with a lot of true facts in different fields, all of which we can try writing down in this language.

Reminds me of Cyc.[1][2]

[1] www.cyc.com [2] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cyc

It doesn't particularly matter, but it looks to me as if there are a couple of errors in the fragment of transcript provided by the author.

It says "the regular exercise thereof" where the scan looks to me much more like "the regular course thereof".

And -- this one is smaller but gave me more trouble -- there's a misplaced comma: it should be after "thereof", not after "intercept". (The sentence structure is a bit weird even with the comma in the right place, but having it in the wrong place makes it even more confusing.)

'exercise' makes more sense to me but you're right it doesn't look like exercise. Perhaps course and exercise mean the same in this context.

BTW, the lines appear about halfway down the scan.

I think this is a cool interpretation of the letter, but it does read a little like one of those books for middle schoolers about how historical figures were actually totally rad or something.

>It turns out that, aside from their common interest in antagonising Isaac Newton, Hooke and Leibniz also shared an interest in mechanising scientific reasoning through the invention of a universal language for science. Leibniz called his project the "Characteristica Universalis".

I'm surprised it doesn't mention Leibniz's famous "Let us calculate" quote:

>>In a 1679 letter to one of his patrons, Johann Friedrich, he described his project of the universal language as “the great instrument of reason, which will carry the forces of the mind further than the microscope has carried those of sight”. Later he wrote:

>>>The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see who is right.[1]

I'm also kind of surprised that Hooke wrote the letter in English, since I assumed all academic communication across language barriers back then would have been in Latin. But ChatGPT tells me Leibniz was unusually multi-lingual.

[1] Sorry, ad-heavy site but I wanted one that gave context: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/let-us-calculate-leibni...

Leibniz invented binary — so he kind of succeeded in his quest.

He based it on the Chinese iching, interestingly enough…

He was ahead of his time, definitely, and binary logic is one critical step in getting there, but we're a long way from having a formal language to represent all claims that would ever arise in human argumentation to the point that it's simply a matter of calculation to resolve them.

Check out metamath.org I can't fathom any valid argument that couldn't be formalized to mathematical statements. There would still be disagreements on axioms and physical postulates, especially where there are conflicts of interest.

The whole project kind of died with Gödel.

He didn’t actually base it on the Yiching, he just noticed that it could be expressed neatly in binary. But he had come up with binary code before that.

Thanks for pointing me to that. Here is some source material.

https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=395

> The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see who is right.

And then Kurt Gödel forever permanently dashed those dreams.

I believe Robert Hooke is mentioned in James Burke’s Connections, a fantastic program that just got a new season on Curiosity Stream; I haven’t seen the new episodes yet but I have thoroughly enjoyed everything else Burke has ever done, so I expect the new series to be great also.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...

The episodes Faith in Numbers (1978 original series, S01E04[0]) and Thunder in the Skies (S01E06)[1] feature Robert Hooke from what I can tell from a little searching, though it’s been a while since I saw the series, so I apologize if I’m wrong on that point, though the entire series is worth watching all the same.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6yL0_sDnX0

[1] https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978/Connections...

>> Cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction about high tech, urban sprawl, and do-it-yourself counterculture.

Those are the superficial signifiers, not a constructive definition of the genre.

What do you suggest?

William Gibson described it as "High tech, low life." It's also described as a Genre that explores the connection and impacts between technology and the human experience.

Should have just quoted what Hooke said... not sure what we're supposed to take away from this.

While it may be a bit old, this kind of crossover celebrity gossip I can get into

EDIT: Presumably this is Robert Hooke as in the author of Micrographia and an early microscope

Yes. In hindsight I'm more surprised we don't hear more about their interactions due to the common enemy pointed out in the article!

If you enjoy Hooke fanfic, he features prominently in Quicksilver.

As does Newton, very quirkily

Also Leibniz, and a bunch of other historical figures from the time.

highly recommend the entire baroque cycle!

Yep. But with a slight warning though, it's a lot of pages. Even by Neal Stephenson's standards, it's a lot. Not everybody has the attention span for this one. It's a very dense plot, with lots of side plots, asides, etc. (which is kind of the whole point of Neal Stephenson's books) that spreads over 9 books that originally were published in 3 volumes of ~1200 pages each depending on font size and edition you would have gotten. I've worked my way through that more times than I'd like to admit because it's enjoyable to re-read. Most recently earlier this year. It usually takes me 1-2 months at least.

Don’t threaten me with a good time!

Highly recommended. What is interesting to me is that he managed to place the Waterhouse family (and Enoch Root, a casual immortal) as some kind of Forrest Gump through history allowing you to see it all through the eyes of someone who could have been there. Anyway, no more spoilers, go read ;) And enjoy!

Hooke in Quicksilver kinda made me mad at my science and physics teachers. He’s just some dude who did things with lenses as far as they would have had me believe.

Some of this book is fantastical but the bones of it are historical fiction.

And springs! They brought up springs, surely. But it is true that Hooke is underrated in popular culture, in part because Newton thought very little of him, unfairly.

Sorry for the dumb question.. where is the transcript? I only see the link to the scanned letter

The transcript doesn’t seem to be finished, the part that the author uses to support their thesis is this excerpt in the article

"...especially in all those subjects where use of [such a language] may be free and where interest and authority do not intercept, the regular exercise thereof which I conceive to be the great antagonists which may impede its progress..."

“Hooke had some proto-liberal views” would be a more grounded interpretation.

Dunno about the blogger's months-long effort, but I put a transcript here just now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45807320

if we could find characters or signs appropriate for expressing all our thoughts

Precursor to De Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater as axiomatic Euclidean geometry.

[1]:https://archive.org/details/confessionsofeng01dequ/page/n2/m...

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