Scientific anniversaries abound this year. DISCOVER has celebrated Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, as well as the 150th anniversary of the great naturalist’s book On the Origin of Species. The year 2009 also marks 350 years of the Royal Society, the British scientific association that dates back to the days of Isaac Newton. And to celebrate, today the society took 60 of the most important and interesting papers ever to grace the pages of its journal, Philosophical Transactions, and put them up on the Internet for the first time.
Since the society predates today's ultra-specialization in science, some of these papers carry a more do-it-yourself tone and lack some of the intense mathematical rigor that marks modern journal articles. But, excluding the archaic grammar and sentence length, they are rather readable (and often endearingly quirky) accounts of false starts, gruesome experiments, and stunning successes. So, with the much of the history ...
