Sir Isaac Newton’s own annotated Principia Mathematica goes online
Stephen Bates, The Guardian, December 13, 2011.
It won’t be for everyone, but some high school students studying physics for the first time are going to read it in the original Newton and see it in a way that was never possible for those of us in the pre-digital age. Will that make a difference? To early to tell; it will take a generation or more to see the results. But I’m betting it does – not, maybe, in the aggregate, but to someone. “You can see Newton’s mind at work in the calculations and how his thinking was developing. His copy of the Principia contains pages interleaved with the printed text with his notes.” Via Open Culture, which adds, “In October, The Royal Society opened its historical archives to the public, bringing 60,000 peer-reviewed papers to the web, including Isaac Newton’s first published research paper. You can dive into this parallel digital archive here.” Latin would be an asset. [Direct Link]
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