Relics of Science History For Sale At Christie's 142
circletimessquare writes "Dennis Overbye at the New York Times has some ruminations on some of the historical totems of science going up for auction at Christie's next week. There is the 1543 copy of 'De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium' by Copernicus, which you can have for $900,000 to $1.2 million. If you have some cash left over, maybe you can pick up an original work by Galileo, Darwin, Descartes, Newton, Freud, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, or Malthus. And then there is the 1878 copy of the world's first phone book: 'a shock of recognition — that people were already talking on the phone a year before Einstein was born. In fact, just two years later Einstein's father went into the nascent business himself. Einstein grew up among the rudiments of phones and other electrical devices like magnets and coils, from which he drew part of the inspiration for relativity. It would not be until 1897, after people had already made fortunes exploiting electricity, that the English scientist J. J. Thomson discovered what it actually was ...'"
as soon as i hit submit (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/searchresults.aspx?intSaleID=21644#intSaleID=21644 [christies.com]
some of this stuff is (relatively) cheap, if you stray away from the really big names. i'm talking names like angstrom, fahrenheit, ampere, babbage, von neumann, can be had for a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand bucks
some of you may wonder what the fuss is all about, but to me, this stuff is awesome. its the fruits of the enlightment, the intellectual explosion of mankind, solid proof of the greatness of mankind, that you can buy and hold in your hands
a lot of us here work in computer science. well, for $2500 you can own the first edition book of something that pretty much started the entire computer field, boolean logic:
BOOLE, George (1815-1864). An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. London: Macmillan and Co., 1854.
http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?from=searchresults&intObjectID=5084071 [christies.com]
well, maybe not $2500 after i just hyped the dang thing
christie's should be paying me a dang commission!
Give Brahe more credit. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:If Freud Was a Scientist, Fire Up My Crack Pipe (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Ugh... (Score:5, Informative)
With objects such as these, despite how rare they are, the knowledge contained within them is already well known. There are very few things that I don't think should be privately owned... The Rosetta Stone comes to mind, as would unpublished works of any of these great minds.
Value of accurate data (Score:4, Informative)
This is not obvious because of the way science history is taught. We learn about the geniuses and a few of the classic blunders. We don't spend much time on the work that was merely not great. Consider the development of quantum mechanics and atomic structure. There were accurate atomic spectra, correct mathematical descriptions of the line spacing, and innumerable incorrect theories about the mechanism before there was a correct description. The spectral observations eventually led to a usable theory, even though they may have been used on the way to support ideas that turned out to be bunk.
Re:Ugh... (Score:5, Informative)
Her take in general: no big deal, happens all the time. They'd rather spend their precious acquisition money on extremely rare stuff of significant interest to the public or to scholars.
Re:If Freud Was a Scientist, Fire Up My Crack Pipe (Score:5, Informative)
Psychology generally doesn't work in terms of "universal laws" - it's the science of individual differences. Some discovery might be true in 30% of the population, have some bearing on about 40%, and be completely wrong for the other 30%. That doesn't mean it isn't true in 30%.
Some people like the smell of tar and some hate it. There cannot be a universal law that says "tar smells bad." And just because an observation can't be explained correctly with the current state of knowledge doesn't mean it isn't science.
I don't really like Freud either, and I think he was mostly a bad philosopher, but to say he didn't contribute anything to the modern understanding of the mind is just wrong.
Re:If Freud Was a Scientist, Fire Up My Crack Pipe (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Give Brahe more credit. (Score:2, Informative)