Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia

thonyc.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 61 posts

Re: The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia

#51

Post by hinkley »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #15

1/3 of London burned down in 1666. It was right at the end of the great plague of London. Wren and Hooke were put in charge of rebuilding the city. 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.

On a tour of a London they mentioned that everyone wanted Wren to design (build?) their churches after the fire. There were too many to manage, so he made them a bargain: church first, steeples after all the churches are done.

Re: The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia

#52

Post by Jrnd893jnn »

computator wrote: post #4

> In England around 1650 coffee houses became the favourite meeting places of the English scientific intelligentsia, the astronomers, mathematicians and natural philosophers. Here, these savants would meet up to exchange ideas, discuss the latest scientific theories and pose challenges to each other. 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 thi…

Our cost of living is so high we cannot afford to not make money to pay to others. That's why.

Re: The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia

#53

Post by BeetleB »

throwlogon wrote: post #50
BeetleB wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The average person seems to have no large stretches of idle time. 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?

No, by idle I meant idle , not what's left over after you've already put in a day's work.

True, but I don't think the average person back then had much idle time either. And a lot of those who did were willing (or perhaps did not have a choice) to have much lower standards of living. I don't mean all the modern conveniences - I mean things like consistent roof on head, consistent food on table, etc.

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.

Re: The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia

#54

Post by saagarjha »

hellofunk wrote: post #11
saagarjha wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do understand that pre-pandemic people still met face-to-face, right?

Notwithstanding your condescending tone of stating something obvious to me as a question, I’m not talking about the pandemic at all. The majority of communication between people is electronic now, messaging, email, the Internet as a whole. You have to go back nearly a couple of decades really to see teenagers (or many adults) who are not glued to their phones and primarily communicating in a digital way. And with reg…

I'm being condescending because your point is just another repackaging of the classic "back in my day" argument. People these days use electronic devices to communicate, yes, but they also meet face-to-face, and go grab lunch and coffee just like people used to in the past. There's nothing especially "raw" or "improvised" about social interaction in the past.

Re: The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia

#55

Post by jecel »

hellofunk wrote: post #34
libraryofbabel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He worked on some of those things in 1666 but did not publish anything. That is kind of the point of the article. Newton had a lot of reluctance around publication; he did not follow modern norms.

I wonder how much of those things he actually figured out in his 20s and just did not publish, versus thinking about them without drawing many conclusions or making significant progress until he actually published 20 years later?

We have his notebook from his 20s. So you can read it yourself and know what he was thinking then and compare it with what he published much later.

https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2020/03/annus-tran...

Re: The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia

#56

Post by watersb »

oxymoron wrote: post #8

Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle is set in this era. Newton, Hooke, Wren, Leibniz and many others all appear as characters. It’s a 2800 page monster, but a treat if you enjoy historical fiction and the history of ideas.

I just finished this beast one hour ago.

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.

Re: The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia

#57

Post by perl4ever »

KineticLensman wrote: post #29
oxymoron wrote: post #8

Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle is set in this era. Newton, Hooke, Wren, Leibniz and many others all appear as characters. It’s a 2800 page monster, but a treat if you enjoy historical fiction and the history of ideas.

Yes. Baroque Cycle is a true monster and varies in quality but I stuck with it for superb perspective on the birth of the modern age, and some of leading scientific rivalries of the time (e.g. Newton vs. Leibniz). As well as the beginnings of science, it also considers the creation of modern finance systems. At the risk of opening up the standard argument about the quality of the endings in Stephenson's books, I thou…

It's entertaining, but the tone and atmosphere are so anachronistic. I like historical fiction that gives more of a sense of the alienness of past societies.

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?"

Re: The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia

#58

Post by hellofunk »

saagarjha wrote: post #54
hellofunk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notwithstanding your condescending tone of stating something obvious to me as a question, I’m not talking about the pandemic at all. The majority of communication between people is electronic now, messaging, email, the Internet as a whole. You have to go back nearly a couple of decades really to see teenagers (or many adults) who are not glued to their phones and primarily communicating in a digital way. And with reg…

I'm being condescending because your point is just another repackaging of the classic "back in my day" argument. People these days use electronic devices to communicate, yes, but they also meet face-to-face, and go grab lunch and coffee just like people used to in the past. There's nothing especially "raw" or "improvised" about social interaction in the past.

It seems you think a differing point of view in a debate must be delivered via condescension, which is unfortunate.

Re: The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia

#59

Post by [deleted] »

watersb wrote: post #56
oxymoron wrote: post #8

Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle is set in this era. Newton, Hooke, Wren, Leibniz and many others all appear as characters. It’s a 2800 page monster, but a treat if you enjoy historical fiction and the history of ideas.

I just finished this beast one hour ago. 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 t…

[deleted]

Re: The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia

#60

Post by divbzero »

danarmak wrote: post #17
hellofunk wrote: post #3

Fascinating, I didn’t realize Newton was into his 40s before he made any specific contributions that led to his larger widespread influence. I just assumed that, like most of the greatest scientists in history, he was in his 20s when he changed the world.

He was ~ 23 years old in 1666 when he published on calculus, the dynamics of moving bodies, inverse-square universal gravitation, and optics (prisms).

1666 was the year Newton spent an extended period at home when an outbreak of the plague forced Cambridge to close. [1]

[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.

Post reply on HN