On The Shoulders Of Giants

[hackenslash]

I have been eyeing this book up for a while, and I managed to grab a copy this week. I had thought that it was simply a book by Hawking dealing with the critical works of astronomy and physics, but it turns out to be complete, direct translations of some of the seminal works in astronomy and physics.  It includes the following, all of which I should have read by now, and some of which have been on my list (but not my bookshelf) for ages but that I have gotten around to (apart from the Einstein):

1. Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolution of Heavenly Spheres
2. Galileo Galilei: Dialogues Concerning Two Sciences
3. Johannes Kepler: Harmony of the World, Book Five
4. Isaac Newton: Principia Mathematica
5. Albert Einstein: The Principle of Relativity

As a musician, I am supremely interested in 3, but all except the Einstein are new to me. It includes a non-intrusive running commentary by Hawking (indeed, I am about ¼ of the way through, and I can't actually tell which bits are Hawking, except the chapter introductions).

Highly recommended for anybody who has not read these seminal works.

I have been looking forward to reading The Grand Design but I have decided to defer it for now, not least because after this book I will be looking at God Created the Integers, also by Hawking, which is a similar treatment of mathematics, including the works of:

    * Euclid
    * Archimedes
    * Diophantus
    * René Descartes
    * Isaac Newton
    * Pierre-Simon Laplace
    * Joseph Fourier
    * Carl Friedrich Gauss
    * Augustin-Louis Cauchy
    * George Boole
    * Bernhard Riemann
    * Karl Weierstrass
    * Richard Dedekind
    * Georg Cantor
    * Henri Lebesgue
    * Kurt Gödel
    * Alan Turing

Further, I suspect that I'm not going to learn much from The Grand Design, or at least not as much as I will learn from these.

[grim-reaper]

Well you have a lot of reading ahead of you, but it's a worthwhile project. One thing I find interesting about both lists of books is that they were written by people from many different countries. Also, some of them had to overcome political and religious opposition in order to get their works published. I wonder why Charles Darwin wasn't included.

[hackenslash]

Because he wasn't an astronomer, a physicist, or a mathematician.

[grim-reaper]

Yes it's true that Charles Darwin was in a different field of science. But I was thinking about the opposition he faced, which put him in the same company some of the with the others in that regard.

Anyway, When Newton said that he stood on the shoulders of giants, he was talking about Galileo and aristotle.

[hackenslash]

Actually, he was mostly talking about Descartes and Hooke.

[grim-reaper]

Is that what Hawking says? I don't think it's correct at all. The way I remember it, Newton and Hooke hated each other.

[hackenslash]

That came later. Newton actually made a lot of mention of Hooke in the Principia but eradicated all references to him after they fell out. There's a really good biography of Newton I read a few years ago by James Gleick that deals with this material in some depth.

http://www.amazon.com/Isaac-Newton-Jame ... 0375422331

[grim-reaper]

Thanks for your reply. I still have some doubts about who Newton was really referring to. Perhaps he meant all the great scientists who came before him. Anyway, I'm going to let it rest. Enjoy your reading!