Newton's Online (and I don't mean the figgy kind)

One of history’s greatest scientists has been in the news recently which is

pretty good since he died almost 300 years ago. Between December of 2011 and February of this year two important institutions have made many thousands of pages of the writing of Isaac Newton available online. Much of it is in Latin and Greek although some is in English.

Isaac Newton

In December of last year, The University of Cambridge Library posted some 4000 pages of Newton’s hand written notes and his own personal printed copy of one of the most important books in the history of science, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica published in 1687, which laid out his laws of motion and account of universal gravitation. The Cambridge collection includes much of his mathematical and scientific writings, and also contains some of his work in alchemy, the pseudo-science of turning base metals into gold or silver among other things.

And in February of this year, the National Library of Israel announced that they were making available some 7,500 pages of Newton’s theological writings. These writings include works about the Bible, theology, the history of ancient cultures, the Tabernacle and Temple, calculations dealing with the end of time, historical documents, and alchemy as well.

Newton’s papers remained in private hands until 1872 when the 5^th Earl of Portsmouth donated the papers he had to Cambridge University where Newton had studied and worked. The Earl expressed his wish to keep the personal papers, so after sorting through the writings, those categorized as “History” “Chronology’ and “Theology” were returned to him.

Those returned “personal” papers eventually went up for auction at Sotheby’s in 1936. At that auction the economist John Maynard Keynes found himself in competition with a Jewish scholar and businessman Abraham Yahuda who was especially interested in Newton’s theological writing, of which there was a large amount. Keynes focused on collecting the works on alchemy and they traded some papers between them based on each collector’s area of interest. Keynes gave his collection to King’s College, Cambridge when he died in 1946. Following Yahuda’s death there were some disputes over the ownership, but they were eventually given to the National Library of Israel. 


You can read more about the history of the papers, Newton and see typed versions of the papers at the Newton Project.

In a manuscript he wrote in 1704 (in the collection in Israel) in which he describes his attempts to extract scientific information from the Bible, he estimated that the world would end no earlier than 2060. In predicting this he said, "This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail.” I don’t know about you, but it sounds to me like he was putting his prediction so far into the future so he could get all the other predictors to shut up. So take that you 2012 doom and gloomers.