The Newton Project
Bringing the works of Isaac Newton to life.
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Rob Iliffe
Professor of Intellectual History and History of Science
Sir Isaac Newton is arguably the greatest scientist of all time. He was a physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist and theologian.
His treatise Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, with further editions in 1713 and 1726, is considered to be the greatest single work in the history of science, and is the cornerstone of the modern physical sciences. On the Newton Project website we aim to bring together all of Newton’s writings in the areas of theology, alchemy, optics, mechanics and mathematics, as well as his correspondence and his work as Master of the Mint, and to make them freely available to everyone online.
Apart from the transcriptions of Newton’s writings, the most popular part of the site is the collection of biographies written about Newton in the 18th and 19th centuries. The vast bulk of this material has never been seen before by more than a handful of scholars, and represents the largest amount of new manuscript material for any individual published in the last century. This is all the more exciting as Newton was just as radical and brilliant in his non-scientific work (he was, for example, a deeply unorthodox religious heretic) as in his better-known research.
Apart from the mammoth editorial task of making these texts available to hundreds of millions via the internet, which has involved solving numerous problems concerning the presentation of high-quality digital content, the major research question driving our activities has been to assess the sorts of relations that might exist between disparate areas of Newton’s work.
The core activity of the project consists of transcribing photocopies of original manuscripts and then encoding them so that they can be easily read by different web browsers. We currently have a three-person team working full time at Sussex, while a group in the USA is transcribing large parts of Newton’s alchemical papers. The project is two years away from completing the transcription of Newton’s theological writings (which amount to about 3.5 million words), but we are already looking for funding to complete the transcription of Newton’s optical writings and in particular, his preparatory work on the Principia Mathematica. Although many editions of printed text have appeared in the last century, historians have looked forward to accomplishing the much larger task of publishing and editing all the drafts of this masterwork. With sufficient funding we aim to have all these drafts transcribed by 2013, and a full edition of all of his writings online by 2015.
