I\u2019m currently about two thirds of the way through the audio version of James Gleick\u2019s book \u201cIsaac Newton\u201d.<\/p>\n
What I\u2019m enjoying most about the biography is hearing about the goings-on at the Royal Society, newly formed in Newton\u2019s day. What emerges from the book, in my opinion, is that the innovation in forming such a society was at least as important as Newton\u2019s discoveries. You can see in the Society\u2019s activities the beginning of peer review, of the journal system, of the need to do experiments reproducing others\u2019 results, and of the need to cite others\u2019 work appropriately.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s very interesting to read about the little intrigues that went on. Someone would publish a new result; Hooke, or Newton, or some other eminence would then claim \u201cOh, I obtained those results many years ago\u201d. That\u2019s all very well, but if someone obtains a result, and then puts the only record in their filing cabinet, Science does not advance<\/em>. Only through publication in archived, widely accessible journals does Science advance. Many early members of the Royal Society seemed to understanding this instinctively, and they moved toward an institutional system in which work is not done<\/em> until it is published<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019m currently about two thirds of the way through the audio version of James Gleick\u2019s book \u201cIsaac Newton\u201d. What I\u2019m enjoying most about the biography is hearing about the goings-on at the Royal Society, newly formed in Newton\u2019s day. What emerges from the book, in my opinion, is that the innovation in forming such a… Continue reading Isaac Newton<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}