Linux Lingam wrote: > newton did not have 'proprietory' rights over his laws and > equations. he published them to share them.
No, he did not. He was so worried about others, often Hooke, stealing his ideas it took the Royal Society nearly 30 years to convince him to publish his second volume to the Principia. Notes to his first volume were published the year Hooke dies, despite being ready a decade earlier. Newton also refused to publish his calculus (he caled it fluxion) openly, only hinting at it in solved answers to problems. We know that he had worked out the basics by 1666 (he was solving problems for Halley which could only have been done with these tools), but he published the methods only in 1687. By that time, Liebniz had published his methods, and Newton spent the next 30 years hounding Liebniz for "stealing his idea". Under pressure from its President, Newton, the Royal Society in 1714 declared that Liebniz had stolen Newton's work; and until 1820s refused to recognize "foreign scientists". There were rumours of an additional volume of the Principia, lost in Manuscript, and never published because Newton did not want to share the glory. In short, Newton is a bad example to cite. Even his quotation, "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants" is a dig at Hooke, who was a short man. > even earlier, leonardo di > vinci > did not have proprietory rights over his inventions and genius. da Vinci was so worried about stolen ideas, he used to write with "mirror writing". This seems stupid to us, used to typeface, but the reflection of a page in cursive script, with abbreviations, can be non-intutive. -- Sanjeev "ghane" Gupta _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- [email protected] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
