- Issac
Newton, from a letter to Robert Hooke, 5 February 1675
Colleagues,
I don't
often find myself feeling positively giddy, but while we spent most of yesterday thinking about how to do science better, something
positively monumental happened:
The
Royal Society put its entire journal archive on-line for free.
The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - the first peer-reviewed scientific journal in the history of the human race - was first published in 1665. Since then, the Society has published more than 60,000 papers, representing some of mankind's most monumental and world-altering scientific achievements.
Want to read what Charles Darwin had to say about the marine origins of Scottish roads? Here you go:
Or a
theory of tides, extracted by Edmund Halley (yes, the comet guy) from Newton's Principia? Le voila:
How
about what happens when you fly a kite in an electrical storm - a trifling piece by a Mr. B.
Franklin of Philadelphia?
Or
perhaps you'd like to read this funky little monograph:
That
one was written by James Clerk Maxwell - a modest man who, like Newton,
acknowledged that he was standing on the shoulders of giants. Maxwell's shoulders proved broad enough to
support Rutherford and Michelson, Einstein and Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg,
and everyone else who came after him.
Maxwell is all but unknown outside the physical science community, but
that paper is the foundation of the modern world. And now it's online, the way it was originally
published. For free.
There's
no point in gilding the lily. Here's the
search engine.
Go have
some fun.
Cheers,
//Don//
