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Asked by anon-202031 to Sophia, Sarah, Meirin, George, Emily, Andy on 7 Mar 2019.
Question: what is your favourite scientific document?
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Sarah O'Sullivan answered on 7 Mar 2019:
A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field by James Clerk Maxwell. These findings are really really important, he deduces that light is an electromagnetic wave and they provided starting points for Albert Einsteins special relativity. Such a pivotal paper!
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Meirin Oan Evans answered on 7 Mar 2019: last edited 7 Mar 2019 5:35 pm
My favourite scientific document could well be Isaac Newton’s Principia. It is hundreds of years old but you can see it with your own eyes in a library in Cambridge. It has fantastic drawings of cannonballs being fired from the Earth, which helped us understand how to fire rockets into space! https://imgur.com/gallery/dzSLWaa
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Andy Buckley answered on 7 Mar 2019:
A Mathematical Theory of Communication, by Claude Shannon. That one paper invented a whole field that underpins computing, the internet, and a lot of the “artificial intelligence” that runs the world today. It’s not physics, but it’s a lovely, inventive paper and not often that one person has sprung such a fully formed big idea from almost nowhere. You can read it online: http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf
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Emily Lewis answered on 11 Mar 2019:
Sometimes it’s nice to go back and read the original paper where important theories have come from! As Meirin mentioned, the Principia was were all of our force equations and motion laws come from, they were added to and expanded later but this was the original document!
But I have to admit I read more popular science books that don’t quite count as scientific documents. I read and loved Stephen Hawkings a brief history of time, it’s about black holes and how time works and it’s what got me interested in physics in the first place.
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