Newton goes online
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An original manuscript containing Sir Isaac Newton's famous laws of motion is among historic works of the great scientist being made publicly available online.
Cambridge University this week published more than 4,000 pages of Newton's most important works on a new digital library website.
They include the scientist's own annotated copy of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.
First published in July 1687, "Principia" not only contains the laws of motion but also Newton's law of universal gravitation. It is widely regarded as one of the most significant works in the history of science.
Over the next few months the university library will upload thousands more pages, making almost the whole of its Newton collection available for anyone to view and download.
Work on the Cambridge Digital Library (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk) began in 2010 with the Newton collection being photographed during last summer.
Up to 200 pages were captured each day, although major conservation work had to be carried out on several manuscripts and notebooks before they could be digitised.
Later the Digital Library will incorporate other collections including the archive of the Board of Longitude and the papers of Charles Darwin.
University librarian Anne Jarvis said: "Over the course of six centuries Cambridge University Library's collections have grown from a few dozen volumes into one of the world's great libraries, with an extraordinary accumulation of books, maps, manuscripts and journals. These cover every conceivable aspect of human endeavour, spanning most of the world's cultural traditions."
Digitisation of the Newton papers was made possible by a £1.5 million gift from the Polonsky Foundation, which supports education and the arts.
Grant Young, digitisation manager at the Cambridge University Library, said: "We are launching our collections to the world with perhaps some of the most important papers and documents in the history of science.
"In addition to his Principia and notebooks, we've included his 'Waste Book' - a very large notebook Newton inherited from his stepfather and filled with notes and calculations when he was forced to leave his studies in Cambridge during the Great Plague.
"With plenty of time and paper to hand, Newton was able to make significant breakthroughs, particularly in his understanding of calculus.
"Anyone, wherever they are, can see at the click of a mouse how Newton worked and how he went about developing his theories and experiments.
"Newton's copy of his Principia shows how methodically he worked through his text; marking alterations, crossing out and annotating his work in preparation for the second edition. Before today, anyone who wanted to see these things had to come to Cambridge. Now we're bringing Cambridge University Library to the world."
Not all of Newton's peers would have approved of the work being shared so openly.
Several manuscripts contain the words 'not fit to be printed' hand-written by Royal Society Fellow Thomas Pellet, who was asked to go through Newton's papers after his death and decide which ones should be published.
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Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
