Years ago I conceived a desire to read
Hamilton's
Elements of Quaternions. This was
part of my independent study of geometric algebras
inspired by working on molecular dynamics and reading
David Hestenes. There's a geometric algebra desk
calculator lurking around
here
somewhere, desperately in need of a rework which I
promise should happen real soon now.
But back to this craving to read Sir William Rowan
Hamilton in the original. Reading the original works of
scientists is unfashionable. Academics would much
rather you read their redactions of the originals, for
which they imagine they will get fame and royalties,
than you look to the actual words of the scientists who
made the discoveries in the first place. It's quite the
racket. Search for "probability" on amazon.com and
you'll find lots and lots of books by professors and
others professing to explain everything you need to
know, and almost nothing by the mathematicians who
worked out the rules of the game that all these
professors, and others, are making their livings off of.
I cornered a professor of mine about this, and he
squirmed, noted that St Johns College used original
works for their science classes, but that most people
considered the originals too hard, or too dated, or too
....
Reading original works is also damned difficult. In the
case of Hamilton, there weren't that many copies in the
world. As it turned out, I needed to move to a large
university town and cultivate a relationship with a
large university library if I ever wanted to see a copy
of Hamilton's
Quaternions. This was too much
work on top of the day job. Then I found a digitized
copy at the Cornell University library on line. But
they were serving it up a page at a time, a real winner
of a user interface for a book that was 800 to 1200
pages depending on the edition. And when I attempted to
gather the pages with an automatic script, I ended up
blocked from access entirely. Sigh.
Those days are now officially over. In the past few
weeks, as a result of looking up original sources in
probability, in showing my mom how to provision the Sony
EReader I gifted her, I happened to search for "hamilton
quaternions" at http://archive.org and I found multiple
scanned copies available for download, first and second
editions. And I found
Populäre Schriften
and
Vorlesungen über Gastheorie von
Dr. Ludwig Boltzmann. And I found the
Mathematical
Papers by William Kingdon Clifford, along with
copies of several less weighty science works. And I
found
Elementary Principles of Statistical
Mechanics,
Elements of Vector Analysis,
and
The Scientific Papers of J. Willard Gibbs.
And I found Hermann Grassmann's
Gesammelte
Mathematische and Physikalische Werke, as edited by
Friedrich Engel, not to be confused with Friedrich
Engels. And I found
The Scientific Papers of
James Clerk Maxwell. And I found all these sources in
probability: Cardano, Bernoulli, Pascal, Fermat, and
Laplace. Finally, I found a copy of "one of the most
quoted and least read books" in the world, von Neumann
and Morgenstern,
Theory of Games and Economic
Behavior. Thank you, Osmania University Library,
where ever you are, and thank you, Google, for doing the
really heavy lifting.
And if your tastes run to less technical topics, well I
found copies of
Ulysses and
Finnegan's
Wake which are going onto my cell phone and laptop
for those moments when watching cat fights on YouTube
just doesn't satisfy.
So the library of the future works like Samuel Clemens
reading newspapers -- you can download anything that's
greater than X years in age, and whether it's a load of
manure should be clear by the time you get around to
reading it. For the privilege of pawing through more
recently manufactured manure, thou shalt pay the
manufacturer his or her due, or visit the public library
and borrow a copy. But almost everything that has
really contributed to our understanding of ourselves and
our world should soon be available to those who can read
and can download. Amazing world.