Sir Isaac Newton’s Papers & Annotated Principia Go Digital

Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty has had many famous grad­u­ates, but per­haps none is more famous than Isaac New­ton (class of 1665). This week, Cam­bridge con­tin­ues to hon­or New­ton by open­ing a dig­i­tal archive of New­ton’s per­son­al papers, which includes an anno­tat­ed copy of the Prin­cip­ia, the land­mark work where the physi­cist devel­oped his laws of motion and grav­i­ty. The ini­tial archive fea­tures 4,000 pages of scanned mate­ri­als (rough­ly 20% of the com­plete New­ton archive), and even­tu­al­ly Cam­bridge will add mate­r­i­al from Charles Dar­win, anoth­er famous alum, and oth­er sci­en­tif­ic fig­ures.

In Octo­ber, The Roy­al Soci­ety opened its his­tor­i­cal archives to the pub­lic, bring­ing 60,000 peer-reviewed papers to the web, includ­ing Isaac Newton’s first pub­lished research paper. You can dive into this par­al­lel dig­i­tal archive here.

Bonus: If you’re look­ing to bone up on Physics, you can find many free physics cours­es in our big col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es. Leonard Susskind’s class on Clas­si­cal Mechan­ics may be of par­tic­u­lar inter­est here.

via The Guardian / ht @eugenephoto