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Never mind the bosons, here’s the Newton papers

Today the people at CERN announced that they had found evidence that the Higgs boson exists. Mind you, they do also say that more data is needed before they can reach any firm conclusions. So not exactly overwhelming evidence.

In other news, Cambridge University has been digitizing their collection of Isaac Newton papers and is putting it online. See http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/. Having had a quick, almost cursory, look through, I think that most of us are going to have to wait for an expert to produce a handy guide and some translation. Any volunteers?

It’s amazing to think that in those papers and notebooks Newton wrote down ideas that revolutionized science and had a huge impact in the world. Compare it to today’s news from CERN. There are hundreds of scientists working there and even if their combined effort does find the Higgs boson (and it’s not looking 100% certain), it won’t have the same impact as Newton’s discoveries. That’s a bit of a sobering thought…

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