I think this is a cool interpretation of the letter, but it does read a little like one of those books for middle schoolers about how historical figures were actually totally rad or something.
>It turns out that, aside from their common interest in antagonising Isaac Newton, Hooke and Leibniz also shared an interest in mechanising scientific reasoning through the invention of a universal language for science. Leibniz called his project the "Characteristica Universalis".
I'm surprised it doesn't mention Leibniz's famous "Let us calculate" quote:
>>In a 1679 letter to one of his patrons, Johann Friedrich, he described his project of the universal language as “the great instrument of reason, which will carry the forces of the mind further than the microscope has carried those of sight”. Later he wrote:
>>>The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see who is right.[1]
I'm also kind of surprised that Hooke wrote the letter in English, since I assumed all academic communication across language barriers back then would have been in Latin. But ChatGPT tells me Leibniz was unusually multi-lingual.
Hooke introduced the effects of cannabis (“an account of the plant”) to the Royal Society and sometimes I wonder about that. Consider this amazingly dramatic title:
“A General Scheme, or Idea of the Present State of Natural Philosophy, And how its Defects may be Remedied by a Methodical Proceeding in the Making Experiments and Collecting Observations whereby to Compile a Natural History, as the Solid Basis for the Superstructure of True Philosophy.”
(Try saying that title in one breath!)
When it comes to cybernetics— Hooke was a big fan of Cornelis Drebbel who designed and built the first cybernetic system (a self regulating oven) and a functional submarine (which produced oxygen by heating saltpetre), and a compound microscope, and chemical air conditioning, and the telescope that Galileo used to find the moons of Jupiter, and a perpetual motion machine based on harvesting barometric pressure changes, and…
It doesn't particularly matter, but it looks to me as if there are a couple of errors in the fragment of transcript provided by the author.
It says "the regular exercise thereof" where the scan looks to me much more like "the regular course thereof".
And -- this one is smaller but gave me more trouble -- there's a misplaced comma: it should be after "thereof", not after "intercept". (The sentence structure is a bit weird even with the comma in the right place, but having it in the wrong place makes it even more confusing.)
TFA says the author has been "trying to transcribe on and off for the past few months." It's a two-page letter in English. To save anyone else the bother (including TFA's author), I just sat down and wrote it all out:
The letter is basically Hooke saying: "Well, I can't convince anyone but you, Leibniz, that Wilkins' Universal Character is a cool idea. I think we'll have problems figuring out the medium (i.e. what the characters look like and so on), but that should all shake out during testing. What kind of testing? Well, we need a bunch of smart people to come up with a lot of true facts in different fields, all of which we can try writing down in this language. Do you know any smart people I could brainstorm some true facts with? If you were to send me some such people, that might get the ball rolling over here."
Now, "get a bunch of smart people together with Robert Hooke to come up with true facts in a wide variety of fields" sounds suspiciously like the founding idea of the Royal Society... but in fact the Royal Society seems to have been started already about 20 years earlier ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham_College_and_the_format... ), so I guess I don't know how this letter fits into the big picture there.
FWIW, John Wilkins (the Bishop of Chester mentioned in the letter) had been dead for nine years by the time this letter was written (1681).
I believe Robert Hooke is mentioned in James Burke’s Connections, a fantastic program that just got a new season on Curiosity Stream; I haven’t seen the new episodes yet but I have thoroughly enjoyed everything else Burke has ever done, so I expect the new series to be great also.
The episodes Faith in Numbers (1978 original series, S01E04[0]) and Thunder in the Skies (S01E06)[1] feature Robert Hooke from what I can tell from a little searching, though it’s been a while since I saw the series, so I apologize if I’m wrong on that point, though the entire series is worth watching all the same.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 28.0 ms ] threadEDIT: Presumably this is Robert Hooke as in the author of Micrographia and an early microscope
I'm surprised it doesn't mention Leibniz's famous "Let us calculate" quote:
>>In a 1679 letter to one of his patrons, Johann Friedrich, he described his project of the universal language as “the great instrument of reason, which will carry the forces of the mind further than the microscope has carried those of sight”. Later he wrote:
>>>The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see who is right.[1]
I'm also kind of surprised that Hooke wrote the letter in English, since I assumed all academic communication across language barriers back then would have been in Latin. But ChatGPT tells me Leibniz was unusually multi-lingual.
[1] Sorry, ad-heavy site but I wanted one that gave context: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/let-us-calculate-leibni...
“A General Scheme, or Idea of the Present State of Natural Philosophy, And how its Defects may be Remedied by a Methodical Proceeding in the Making Experiments and Collecting Observations whereby to Compile a Natural History, as the Solid Basis for the Superstructure of True Philosophy.”
(Try saying that title in one breath!)
When it comes to cybernetics— Hooke was a big fan of Cornelis Drebbel who designed and built the first cybernetic system (a self regulating oven) and a functional submarine (which produced oxygen by heating saltpetre), and a compound microscope, and chemical air conditioning, and the telescope that Galileo used to find the moons of Jupiter, and a perpetual motion machine based on harvesting barometric pressure changes, and…
I'm having a Baader-Meinhof effect moment right now :)
Precursor to De Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater as axiomatic Euclidean geometry.
[1]:https://archive.org/details/confessionsofeng01dequ/page/n2/m...
Those are the superficial signifiers, not a constructive definition of the genre.
It says "the regular exercise thereof" where the scan looks to me much more like "the regular course thereof".
And -- this one is smaller but gave me more trouble -- there's a misplaced comma: it should be after "thereof", not after "intercept". (The sentence structure is a bit weird even with the comma in the right place, but having it in the wrong place makes it even more confusing.)
https://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/disseminate/leibniz.html
The letter is basically Hooke saying: "Well, I can't convince anyone but you, Leibniz, that Wilkins' Universal Character is a cool idea. I think we'll have problems figuring out the medium (i.e. what the characters look like and so on), but that should all shake out during testing. What kind of testing? Well, we need a bunch of smart people to come up with a lot of true facts in different fields, all of which we can try writing down in this language. Do you know any smart people I could brainstorm some true facts with? If you were to send me some such people, that might get the ball rolling over here."
Now, "get a bunch of smart people together with Robert Hooke to come up with true facts in a wide variety of fields" sounds suspiciously like the founding idea of the Royal Society... but in fact the Royal Society seems to have been started already about 20 years earlier ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham_College_and_the_format... ), so I guess I don't know how this letter fits into the big picture there.
FWIW, John Wilkins (the Bishop of Chester mentioned in the letter) had been dead for nine years by the time this letter was written (1681).
Reminds me of Cyc.[1][2]
[1] www.cyc.com [2] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cyc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...
The episodes Faith in Numbers (1978 original series, S01E04[0]) and Thunder in the Skies (S01E06)[1] feature Robert Hooke from what I can tell from a little searching, though it’s been a while since I saw the series, so I apologize if I’m wrong on that point, though the entire series is worth watching all the same.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6yL0_sDnX0
[1] https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978/Connections...