Fall Cerebral Event at Linda Hall Library

We spent a fascinating morning in the Rare Book Room at Linda Hall Library.  Dr. Ben Gross (Ph.D. History of Science, Princeton) put together a cool set of old books for us.

London (Hooke's Micrographia (1665), Willughby and Ray's De Historia Piscium (1686) and Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica (in English, 1729)):

Hooke's microscope

Willughby & Ray

Newton's first law

Then on to Paris (Émilie du Châtelet's Principes mathématiques de la philosophie naturelle (1759), Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie (1751), Lavoisier's Traité élémentaire de chimie (1789)).

Lavoisier

To Germany (Haeckel's Kunstformen der Nature (1904), Rontgen's Ueber eine neue Art van Strahlen (1895), and.... Einstein's Zur Electrodynamik bewegter Körper (1905):

Haeckel's art in nature book

Rontgen's famous hand X-ray

And then a real treat for us: three wonderful MIT books: Edgerton's Flash! (1939), Wiener's Cybernetics (1948) and Vannevar Bush' Science: The Endless Frontier (1945)

Here's a photo of some of our alumni that morning:

Steve, Deb, Eric and Eric's wife