Chymistry of Isaac Newton: A Rigorous Analysis of the Language of Alchemy

艾萨克·牛顿的化学：对炼金术语言的严格分析

• 批准号: 0924983
• 负责人: William Newman
• 金额: $ 52.34万
• 依托单位: Indiana University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-09-01 至 2012-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0924983&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Chymistry; Isaac; Newton; Rigorous; Analysis; Chymistry; Isaac; Newton; Rigorous; Analysis

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).A team at Indiana University is now completing an online, searchable edition of Newton's chemical writings, comprising over one hundred manuscripts, which comes to about a million words of manuscript material. That project has received substantial support from NSF and it will be complemented by the present project. The electronic corpus of Newton's chemical work is filled with obscure and archaic terms such as "foliated earth" and "vegetable Saturn," whose physical referents are not immediately obvious. In addition, Newton left behind substantial manuscript laboratory notebooks filled with chemical experiments, whose aim or purpose he nowhere describes. The present project proposes to analyze such experiments and technical terms by means of well established tools of computational linguistics. In particular, the proposal aims to use machine-collocation of terms and their statistical occurrence to locate meaningful patterns of experimental practice and recurrent terminology. The project will result in a new and deeper understanding of Newton's goals for his chemical theory and practice, which is in itself a very major undertaking. More than this, however, the tools developed and adapted from computational linguistics by the team at Indiana University will be applicable to other corpora of scientific texts once they have been digitized. Historically significant sources in biology, material science, and medicine are filled with archaic and unclear terminology that is often as opaque as the chemical vocabulary of Newton. In short, the tools developed by the Chymistry of Isaac Newton team will be applicable to digitized textual corpora ranging from the works of the second-century physician Galen up to the correspondence of the famous founder of modern evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin. The history of science is intrinsically a difficult area of research, in part because of the technical language that scientific writers have used from antiquity up to the present day. The approach being implemented in the current project will greatly facilitate and possibly transform history of science research.

该奖项是根据2009年的《美国复苏与再投资法》（Privical Law 111-5）资助的。印第安纳大学的一支团队现在正在完成牛顿化学著作的在线，可搜索的版本，其中包括一百多个手稿，大约是一百万个手稿材料。该项目已得到NSF的大力支持，并将得到本项目的补充。牛顿化学作品的电子语料库充满了晦涩和古老的术语，例如“叶状地球”和“蔬菜土星”，它们的物理参考物并不明显。此外，牛顿还留下了充分的手稿实验室笔记本，里面装有化学实验，其目的或目的他尚无描述。本项目建议通过建立的计算语言学工具来分析此类实验和技术术语。特别是，该提案旨在利用术语的机器协议及其统计，以定位有意义的实验实践和经常性术语的模式。该项目将使对牛顿的化学理论和实践目标有了更深入的了解，这本身就是一项非常重要的事业。然而，不仅如此，印第安纳大学团队的计算语言学开发和改编的工具将一旦数字化，将适用于其他科学文本语料库。具有历史意义的生物学，材料科学和医学来源充满了古老和不清楚的术语，这些术语通常像牛顿的化学词汇一样不透明。简而言之，艾萨克·牛顿（Isaac Newton Team）Chymistry开发的工具将适用于数字化的文本语料库，从第二世纪医师Galen的作品到现代进化论著名创始人查尔斯·达尔文（Charles Darwin）的往来。从本质上讲，科学的历史是一个艰难的研究领域，部分原因是科学作家从上古到今天使用的技术语言。当前项目中实施的方法将极大地促进并可能改变科学研究的历史。