
Isaac Newton’s Personal Notebooks Go Digital - wicknicks
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/isaac-newton-papers/
======
asolove
I am very glad to see the images available, and am sure that a lot of very
good work was put into the scanning and transcription, much less the political
fight that eventually allowed the rights to the expensive scans to be made
public.

That said, it is a bit sad to see yet another manuscript viewing UI in yet
another siloed archive. More specifically:

\- There is no way to link to an individual page, so while the manuscript is
"online" it is not addressable as part of the linked web. Scholars who write
about the manuscript will be unable to link to a specific item or to share
linked-data with one another.

\- How long will these URLs be valid? "<http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-
ADD-04004/> seems like the sort of thing that might get changed at the next
departmental reorganization or database change.

\- When viewing the manuscript, the hidden "contents" tab is far more valuable
than the open "introduction" tab, and by default each manuscript is opened to
page 0, which usually requires about ten manual page turns before landing at
even the title page.

Some things that would be very nice to see in this field:

\- An accepted metadata format or REST protocol for manuscripts, so that we
could use a viewer of choice

\- An inventive scholar to write digital scholarship that comments on these
manuscripts using the full power of hypertext to link pages together, trace
themes or ideas through different parts of the text, compare proof or notation
methods between different texts in the corpus.

~~~
w1ntermute
Is this under copyright? If not, then someone should just download the whole
thing and reupload it in a more accessible format.

~~~
alanfalcon
The Cambridge University Library claims copyright on the images, however they
do offer this license:

"Images made available for download are licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC 3.0)"

So there's no reason why someone couldn't do exactly what you suggest.
(Unfortunately, the images you can download seem to be much lower resolution
than the ones they're hosting.)

~~~
nl
The images you download are 1400x2000px, which seems reasonable.

The zoom feature gives you access to image tiles. From a quick look, these are
258x258px images, named [http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/content/images/MS-
ADD-04004-002-00...](http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/content/images/MS-
ADD-04004-002-0000<page_number-2>_files/13/<column>_<row>.jpg)

Or something like that anyway.

It also uses something called Microsoft DeepZoom
([http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/content/images/MS-
ADD-04004-001-00...](http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/content/images/MS-
ADD-04004-001-00002.dzi)), and is powered by a Json manifest
([http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/json/MS-
ADD-04004.json?_dc=1323748...](http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/json/MS-
ADD-04004.json?_dc=1323748616915&page=4&start=3&limit=1))

Enjoy.

------
snotrockets
Israel's National Library holds another collection of Newton, composed of his
notes on matters non scientific: mostly alchemy and theology.

Scans of which were recently made available online at
[http://dlib.nli.org.il/R/?func=collections&collection_id...](http://dlib.nli.org.il/R/?func=collections&collection_id=785).
6 (but it seems as if there's some problem with the website ATM.)

------
akg
Newton has been an inspiration. There was a famous quote by him that always
stuck by me: "If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get
similar results."

~~~
gruseom
I highly doubt Newton said that. That's a modern, post-romantic way of
thinking. Moreover, it would have been hugely impolite in the 17th century.

~~~
ajax77
You highly doubt a revolutionary figure said a radical thing because it would
have been considered impolite/revolutionary/radical?

Newton was in a world of his own; he, along with a few select others (Lock,
Descartes and others), are in large part responsible for the Enlightenment.
The very Enlightenment this statement characterizes so well. Even if he didn't
say it (I cannot find the source, but I have read this quote a number of times
in various papers), it is very much the kind of statement he would make.

~~~
gruseom
No, it isn't, for the same reason Newton didn't wear his hair like Elvis. No
one invents his own culture. This has nothing to do with how radical Newton's
ideas were or how great a genius he was. It has to do with what cultural forms
existed at the time. You have to get to figures like Byron before this kind of
statement makes sense (and my bet is that this one comes from later even than
that).

However, I'm no scholar of the 17th century. Prove me wrong. If Newton said
something that sensational, it won't be hard to track down. I didn't search
for it like I usually do before making these claims, so your job should be
easy.

~~~
ajax77
Hard work as a means to success is hardly a post-romantic invention. Newton
was very much a student of Aristotle, the teachings of whom we can see very
much aligned with the statement in question.

In that light, would you also doubt these verified Newtonian quotes that
suggest similar thinking? "If I have seen further it is only by standing on
the shoulders of giants." "Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in
the multiplicity and confusion of things." "If I am anything, which I highly
doubt, I have made myself so by hard work."

~~~
gruseom
The first quote is proverbial, and Newton certainly said it, but the phrase
dates from the 12th century
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_gi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants))
and is not part of Enlightenment tradition. Quite the opposite, in fact: it
comes from the medieval tradition of abasing yourself before the ancients. So
no, it doesn't resemble the disputed quote at all.

The second is not familiar to me, but it is 17th century language and does
sound like something Newton would say. But it's irrelevant here. He's talking
about nature, not himself.

The third is much closer to the disputed quote. But I don't believe Newton
said this either. You know who said things like that? Horatio Alger. So let's
see a textual source in Newton's works before accepting it as evidence.

Here's a helpful trick. When you Google a quote and the first page consists
entirely of junk like this:

[http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-
ab&hl=en&source=h...](http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-
ab&hl=en&source=hp&q=%22If+I+am+anything%2C+which+I+highly+doubt%22)

... that's a sign that the quote is bogus.

~~~
ajax77
I looked for the "sign that the quote is bogus" but missed it. Maybe results
that have 5 million hits are bogus? Maybe results that have relevant links are
bogus? I can enter all sorts of valid quotes from both current and historic
figures into Google, and obtain very similar results. ("Ask Not What Your
Country Can Do For You", "A man should look for what is, and not for what he
thinks should be", "A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not
discovered the value of life.") I fail to see how that adds anything to the
discussion. Neither do I see how the fact that Newton restated, rather than
originated, a particular idea, helps your argument.

Also, please inform me as to how this statement relates to Lord Byron. Nothing
I've read of Byron would favor him as the statement's originator over Newton.
I can't help but think of this scene from Good Will Hunting when I read your
replies
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymsHLkB8u3s&t=1m56s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymsHLkB8u3s&t=1m56s)

~~~
gruseom
Hey, this isn't a competition. We're just talking about an interesting
historical question.

Maybe one point deserves clarification.

When you Google an authentic quote by a very famous person, a precise textual
citation is usually locatable through one of the top results (or something it
links to). Therefore, when you Google a quote by a very famous person and
nothing but quotespam sites come up, the quote is probably bogus.

I've never seen an authentic quote that fails this test. If anyone can find
one -- that is, find a quote by a very famous person, the first page of Google
results for which is all quotespam, but which nevertheless is an authentic
quote as proven by a real textual reference -- I would like to see it.

~~~
nl
Searching books.google.com for the quote is very useful too.

~~~
gruseom
Indeed it is, especially with the inauthor tag, as in:

    
    
      inauthor:"Isaac Newton"
    

Google Books is an amazing resource. Would there were a way to get the full
text of everything.

------
beefman
direct link: <http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/newton>

------
epynonymous
pretty cool! 20 bucks says that someone makes an ipad app of this.

~~~
abailin
That would be a great app - but there would be hundreds of MBs of images for
one of his books. Not sure if there's a size limit in the app store.

