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

该奖项是根据2009年《美国复苏和再投资法案》(Public Law 111-5)资助的。印第安纳大学的一个团队目前正在完成牛顿化学著作的在线可搜索版本，包括100多篇手稿，总计约100万字的手稿材料。该项目得到了国家科学基金会的大力支持，并将得到本项目的补充。牛顿化学工作的电子语料库充满了晦涩而古老的术语，如“叶状地球”和“植物土星”，这些术语的物理指称并不是立即明显的。此外，牛顿留下了大量的手稿实验室笔记本，上面写满了化学实验，他没有描述这些实验的目的或目的。本项目建议借助成熟的计算语言学工具对这些实验和技术术语进行分析。特别是，该提案旨在使用术语的机器搭配及其统计出现情况，以确定有意义的实验实践模式和重复使用的术语。该项目将导致对牛顿的化学理论和实践目标的新的和更深入的理解，这本身就是一项非常重大的事业。然而，更重要的是，印第安纳大学的团队从计算语言学开发和改编的工具将适用于其他科学文本语料库，一旦它们被数字化。生物学、材料科学和医学中具有重要历史意义的资料中充斥着古老而不明确的术语，这些术语往往像牛顿的化学词汇一样晦涩难懂。简而言之，由艾萨克·牛顿团队开发的工具将适用于数字化文本语料库，范围从公元2世纪的内科医生加伦的著作到现代进化理论的著名创始人查尔斯·达尔文的信件。科学史本质上是一个困难的研究领域，部分原因是科学作家从古至今一直使用的技术语言。目前项目中正在实施的方法将极大地促进并可能改变科学研究的历史。

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.