
The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia - hecubus
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2020/07/15/the-emergence-of-modern-astronomy-a-complex-mosaic-part-xl/
======
computator
> _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 this, but I've never heard of such coffee
houses in the decades years immediately before the web (1970s, 80s, 90s), so
it's not like the web displaced them. EDIT: To be clear, I don't think the web
is good replacement. So I'm puzzled why we don't have these kind of coffee
houses anymore.

What would you say to a coffee shop, open late, with intelligent speakers,
animal exhibits, autopsies[1], science experiments, all kinds of talks,
painting lessons, something different every night, lots of random and
interesting things to try and rekindle the intellectual coffee shop of old
England?

[1] Well maybe not this one, but a Victorian-era coffee shop actually did do
some public autopsies.

~~~
hellofunk
> 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 this

No, I disagree. The web is not a replacement for normal social interaction.
Zoom is not a replacement for in person meetings. The web does not replace an
actual coffee shop, and social media or email does not replace a phone call.

Unfortunately, our newest adult generation will never understand what beauties
there were in life before people only communicated electronically.

~~~
GuB-42
That's just nostalgia, electronic communication is in many ways better than
face to face, even if it is worse in others. Electronic communication allows
you to communicate with _the_ specialist in your field, located in the other
side of the world. It is constantly available thanks to smartphones. If you
have a great idea, you can share it immediately, if your phone is waterproof,
you don't even need to leave your shower. You can ask question and get answer
within seconds when you are working on your subject.

Pandemic aside, our "newest adult generation" still can meet in real life. But
they are now able to take advantage of both electronic and face-to-face
communication with a level of expertise older generations don't have, and
better manage potential distractions.

I don't worry about them, not on that subject anyways. They are perfectly able
to understand the beauties in life, like every human did since humans existed.
It is just that times change and people adapt.

~~~
hellofunk
I understand your point, even if I do disagree somewhat. While the freedom to
interact in ways that are not electronic is still an option, it is such a tiny
fraction of the choices most people make when communicating, that the presence
of this option almost seems irrelevant.

------
oxymoron
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.

~~~
watersb
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.

------
heymijo
Atoav above described this culture in Viennese coffee houses where _" you get
one coffee and stay for hours."_

I have seen this environment at a small university town where I used to live.
You overhear all sorts of interesting conversations ranging from the middle
school kids who walk there after school to professors researching antibiotic
resistance.

------
dr_dshiv
Who did Isaac Newton credit with the discovery of the inverse square law of
gravity? He specifically claimed it was Pythagoras, 6th century BC
mathematician, who showed the inverse square relationship in the tension of a
musical string and in the "harmony of the Spheres". The Pythagoreans are
remembered for their belief that the world is made of math ("all is number")
-- something that Newton did much to prove in his Principia.

~~~
dr_dshiv
From the original article:

> Newton had delivered up a mathematical proof that an elliptical orbit would
> be produced by an inverse square force situated at one of the foci of the
> ellipse, thus combining the inverse square law of gravity with Kepler’s
> first law.

Then, the source quote from Newton's Principia: "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."

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

~~~
tomtomtom777
Very interesting. Wouldn't such reasoning serve as evidence for the
heliocentric model, which I thought was known as a theory but not generally
accepted at the time of Pythagoras?

~~~
dr_dshiv
Aristotle makes fun of the Pythagorean proposal that there might be a counter-
earth orbiting on the other side of the sun, so it can never be seen. But if
you think about it, that's only possible in a heliocentic worldview.
Coperinicus, at least, believed that the Pythagoreans believed in
heliocentrism:

[https://www.jstor.org/stable/228080?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_...](https://www.jstor.org/stable/228080?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents)

------
hellofunk
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.

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

~~~
libraryofbabel
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.

~~~
hellofunk
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?

~~~
jecel
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...](https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2020/03/annus-
tranquillum.html)

------
dr_dshiv
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.

~~~
dr_dshiv
To learn more about the relationship between Newton and Hooke, I recommend "An
Unpublished Letter of Robert Hooke to Isaac Newton" BY ALEXANDRE KOYRE, 1952

"Hooke who, as Curator of Experiments of the Royal Society, was supposed "to
furnish the Society every day [they met once a week] with three or four
considerable experiments"

"The registers of the Royal Society testify to the eagerness with which Hooke
hurried from one inquiry to another with brilliant but inconclusive results.
Among those which early engaged his attention were the nature of the air, its
function in respiration and combustion, specific weights, the law of falling
bodies, the improvement of land-carriage and diving bells, methods of
telegraphy and the relations of barometrical readings to changes in the
weather. He measured the vibrations of a pendulum two hundred feet long
attached to the steeple of St. Paul; invented a useful machine for cutting the
teeth of watch-wheels; fixed the thermometer zero at freezing-point of water;
and ascertained (in July I664) the number of vibrations corresponding to
musical notes"

------
carapace
Odd little bit of trivia: we don't know what Hooke looked like. Few images of
him were ever made and none survive.

------
alexfromapex
This is illustrated in Neil Degrasse Tyson’s Cosmos on Disney+ for those
interested

------
plg
Man, if only my history classes in high school were like this article, I _may_
have actually stayed awake, read the text, gived a damn.

------
m4r35n357
Wow, I know Hooke was a complete dick to Newton over the optics, but I didn't
realize he tried to shaft Newton _again_.

