
College Notebook of Isaac Newton - Insanity
http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-04000/
======
sbr464
You can download higher resolution versions of the notebook pages by using a
dezoooming tool[1] on the image tiles.

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](https://github.com/lovasoa/dezoomify)

[2]:
[https://ophir.alwaysdata.net/dezoomify/dezoomify.html#https:...](https://ophir.alwaysdata.net/dezoomify/dezoomify.html#https://images.lib.cam.ac.uk/content/images/MS-
ADD-03969-001-00001_files/13/0_0.jpg)

[3]: [https://images.lib.cam.ac.uk/content/images/MS-
ADD-03969-001...](https://images.lib.cam.ac.uk/content/images/MS-
ADD-03969-001-00001.jpg)

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dr_dshiv
Newton credited the discovery of the inverse square law of gravity to
Pythagoras (5th century BC), just as Coperinicus had credited heliocentrism to
him. Here is Newton's argument:

"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](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098)

~~~
philzook
That's an interesting suggestion I've never heard before, but your link
appears to be down. I'm getting a 404. Is it possible this passage is
referring to the reciprocal Pythagorean theorem?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem#Reciprocal...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem#Reciprocal_Pythagorean_theorem)

~~~
dr_dshiv
[https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.1966.001...](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.1966.0014)

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.

------
growlist
Pages 43 and 44!

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.

~~~
Jenz
[http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-
ADD-04000/43](http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-04000/43)

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max_
Is that a "Hand" doodle? [http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-
ADD-04000/15](http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-04000/15)

~~~
pvida
It certainly seems so.

I love how simple-yet-not-too-simple it is.

~~~
jq-r
It is the exactly the same hand symbol Henry VIII used to mark down
interesting passages in Bible which he hoped would help him to annul his
marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

~~~
ian0
Apparently called an index or manicule with examples spotted from the 12th
century..

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_(typography)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_\(typography\))

~~~
lioeters
Delightful! I'd say this manicule is a proto-emoji of sorts.

> 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.

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alister
Page 32:

> _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.

~~~
josh_fyi
What looks like y^2 (or superscript 2) is an abbreviation for "the".

~~~
alister
Thank you, I've corrected it. It raises the question of why anyone bothered
with a 2 symbol abbreviation for just 3 letters.

~~~
MLR
Old English had a letter called thorn that would eventually be replaced with
the modern th or a y (ye olde is just said the old).

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.

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vansul
I love this book. They currently have his 1659-61 notebook on display at the
Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (scan available at [0])

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...](https://mss-
cat.trin.cam.ac.uk/manuscripts/uv/view.php?n=R.4.48c&n=R.4.48c#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=51&xywh=-1483%2C-2%2C5173%2C2778)

------
screpy
Why do they tell us about this process in schools only with an apple fall?
Actually, there is a lot of effort behind it and we ignore it.

~~~
ponker
This has always been the dumbest Eureka myth because... Isaac Newton only
noticed that shit falls downwards when an apple fell on his head?! If it was
something that gave him some insight into the mechanism... like two differe
tobjects falling at the same time and landing at the same time, causing him to
think about force and mass etc... that would make much more sense.

~~~
stan_rogers
As it was relayed, the apple thing was the moment that he realised that the
mysterious force holding the celestial objects in their orbits was exactly the
same force as gravity.

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.

~~~
emmelaich
Was there really a property proposed called levity?

I thought that that was only mentioned in parodies of Newton.

e.g. [https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/363707/view/caricature-
of...](https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/363707/view/caricature-of-newton-s-
laws-of-gravity-)

~~~
stan_rogers
Yes, and it goes back _at least_ as far as Aristotle (although he would have
used a rather Greeker word). Levity would have been a property of fire and air
in Aristotelian physics, where gravity was a property of earth and water.

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rutherblood
that handwriting is surprisingly legible

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dr_dshiv
"On music" is on page 288.. A little bit of psychology precedes it.

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yitchelle
It is remarkable that there are not alot corrections among the written text.

The text is extremely readable and understanble, even for a non-mathematician
like me.

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noisy_boy
Idle thought: imagine if Newton examined modern programming and said "let me
show you a new approach I've been thinking about for a while ..."

------
max_
Any possibility to have this typed & formatted for easy reading?

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bra-ket
The funny thing about Newton is that he was treating pseudo-science like
alchemy with the same level of seriousness as actual science he helped advance
so much.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_stud...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studies#Alchemical_research)

~~~
beenBoutIT
Alchemy wasn't scientifically disproven until the 19th century, so Newton had
no choice but to explore it. If transforming base metals to gold was
scientifically plausible and illegal(as it was in Newton's day) most of us on
this board would be chasing after it at full speed right now.

~~~
tpetricek
It's not just that alchemy was not "scientifically disproven" in Newton's
time. There was no such thing as "scientific" and "pseudo-scientific". Reading
about Newton's thinking about alchemy is a fascinating look at a way of
thinking that we can hardly imagine today. I also thought that it is a nice
reminder of the (certain but unimaginable) limitations of our present
thinking. There is a fascinating (but pretty academic) book about Newton's
Alchemy: [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Foundations-Newtons-Alchemy-
Cambrid...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Foundations-Newtons-Alchemy-Cambridge-
Paperback/dp/0521273811)

~~~
submeta
What a wonderful perspective to look at this. We take so many things for
granted. The knowledge we have is beautifully compartmented by artificial
boundaries we take for granted. All the faculties we have: we rarely question
the architecture of this building of knowledge we grow up with.

------
abhayhegde
He was certainly having fun! A refreshing peek through his mind.

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.

~~~
dekervin
What part of his life was terrible ?

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hank_z
Any modern text recognition technology is applicable to his handwriting?

