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Science

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.'"
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Royal Society Releases Historic Science Papers

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  • by bughunter ( 10093 ) <bughunter@@@earthlink...net> on Monday November 30, 2009 @08:24PM (#30277580) Journal

    Yeah, this is fascinating stuff, especially as I'm reading Quicksilver [wikipedia.org] right now, in which are depicted "plausible recreations" of some early Society experiments in optics, chemistry, physics, and physiology, including a rather gruesome account of the live dissection of a dog.

    Stephenson also breathes some life and character into historical figures associated with the Royal Society, not the least of whom are Newton and Leibniz. Worth a read if you have any interest in the history of science.

  • by interactive_civilian ( 205158 ) <mamoru@@@gmail...com> on Monday November 30, 2009 @08:35PM (#30277684) Homepage Journal

    This is really cool stuff, and I find it very interesting to scroll the timeline on Trailblazing to get an idea of the historical context of these papers. I just wish there were more than 60 of them and covering more fields. Still, I'm looking forward to reading Watson and Crick's paper, Gould and Lewontin's paper, and perhaps even Maxwell's paper if I can handle it.

    I'm a really big fan of the Royal Society. They have so much high quality research available under Open Access, including any papers in Philosophical Transactions B (which I tend to get stuff from the most as my interests are more related to Biology) that are more than a year old. I'm looking forward to their 350th Anniversary Issue [royalsocie...ishing.org] which comes out in 2 weeks under Open Access. It's looking to have some interesting articles. In fact, all of the things they are doing for their 350th anniversary are really cool. Check them out: http://royalsocietypublishing.org/site/authors/2010.xhtml [royalsocie...ishing.org]

  • by countertrolling ( 1585477 ) on Monday November 30, 2009 @08:41PM (#30277734) Journal

    "... our ignorance of the Earth system is overwhelming and intensified by the tendency to favour model simulations over experiments, observation and measurement."

    "We could find ourselves enslaved in a Kafka-like world from which there is no escape."

    Could?

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