Royal Society Releases Historic Science Papers 83
krou writes "To celebrate its 350th anniversary, the Royal Society has released a number of historic science papers and made them available online via its Trailblazing website. Among the papers are Benjamin Franklin's notes on his kite-flying experiment, a paper on black holes co-written by Professor Stephen Hawking, manuscripts from Sir Isaac Newton showing 'that white light is a mixture of other colours,' and a few other interesting details such as 'a gruesome account of a 17th century blood transfusion.'"
Re:This might have saved... (Score:5, Informative)
including a rather gruesome account of the live dissection of a dog.
A live dissection is also known as a vivisection. It is derived from the Latin term meaning, to cut life: “Vivis” (life) and “Sectus” (to cut).
Re:F v. S ? (Score:5, Informative)
It's a long s [wikipedia.org].
Re:This might have saved... (Score:3, Informative)
A live dissection is also known as a vivisection. It is derived from the Latin term meaning, to cut life: “Vivis” (life) and “Sectus” (to cut).
<pedant>
vivus "alive" => vivi-
seco "to cut" => sectio(n)-
</pedant>
(The words you give aren't exactly incorrect, they're just a weird choice of forms)
Re:Links? (Score:3, Informative)
Grrrrr (rips open reference with sharp-filed cursor)
That's an early form of the letter "s", the "long S" from Carolingian Minuscule. You'll notice it has no crossbar, as does the letter "f". The "s" we know was often used at the end of words as a bit of shorthand, similar to the cursive un-crossed T.
The quote should read "Make a small cross, of two light strips of cedar".
Don't argue, you expected this post.
Re:They left an important paper out... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm very use to typing Quakers (correct spelling). Forgive the muscle memory induced typo.
Some choice papers (Score:3, Informative)
I've looked over this archive (before Slashdot posted it), and I found several articles which were very interesting to me.
Leeuwenhoek's description [doi.org] of the "little animals" he saw with his early microscope (1677) -- this one is quite long and many entries are repetitive, but it is a detailed account of Leeuwenhoek's regular experiments and observations with microscopic life forms.
Surviving in a room heated to 260 degrees Fahrenheit [doi.org] (1775) -- this paper strikes me as absolutely incredulous in its claims; I did not know that people could survive such heat (I have not yet found any modern information supporting or disproving this claim, so information about this from a modern science perspective would be nice!).
I have a large backlog of papers which I would like to read, but which I cannot right now due to time constraints. I certainly would like to read more of these if I had the time to do so.
Bravo to the Royal Society for making these publicly accessible and easily explored. I now have an urge to read some of the early Philosophical Transaction papers not highlighted in Trailblazing.