[HN Gopher] Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk" Letter to Gottfried Leibniz
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Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk" Letter to Gottfried Leibniz
Author : Gormisdomai
Score : 63 points
Date : 2025-11-03 15:45 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mynamelowercase.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mynamelowercase.com)
| TZubiri wrote:
| While it may be a bit old, this kind of crossover celebrity
| gossip I can get into
|
| EDIT: Presumably this is Robert Hooke as in the author of
| Micrographia and an early microscope
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Yes. In hindsight I'm more surprised we don't hear more about
| their interactions due to the common enemy pointed out in the
| article!
| sevensor wrote:
| If you enjoy Hooke fanfic, he features prominently in
| _Quicksilver_.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| As does Newton, very quirkily
| zacwellmer wrote:
| highly recommend the entire baroque cycle!
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Yep. But with a slight warning though, it's a lot of pages.
| Even by Neal Stephenson's standards, it's a lot. Not
| everybody has the attention span for this one. It's a very
| dense plot, with lots of side plots, asides, etc. (which is
| kind of the whole point of Neal Stephenson's books) that
| spreads over 9 books that originally were published in 3
| volumes of ~1200 pages each depending on font size and
| edition you would have gotten. I've worked my way through
| that more times than I'd like to admit because it's
| enjoyable to re-read. Most recently earlier this year. It
| usually takes me 1-2 months at least.
| hinkley wrote:
| Hooke in Quicksilver kinda made me mad at my science and
| physics teachers. He's just some dude who did things with
| lenses as far as they would have had me believe.
|
| Some of this book is fantastical but the bones of it are
| historical fiction.
| jhbadger wrote:
| And springs! They brought up springs, surely. But it is
| true that Hooke is underrated in popular culture, in part
| because Newton thought very little of him, unfairly.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| I think this is a cool interpretation of the letter, but it does
| read a little like one of those books for middle schoolers about
| how historical figures were actually totally rad or something.
| SilasX wrote:
| >It turns out that, aside from their common interest in
| antagonising Isaac Newton, Hooke and Leibniz also shared an
| interest in mechanising scientific reasoning through the
| invention of a universal language for science. Leibniz called his
| project the "Characteristica Universalis".
|
| I'm surprised it doesn't mention Leibniz's famous "Let us
| calculate" quote:
|
| >>In a 1679 letter to one of his patrons, Johann Friedrich, he
| described his project of the universal language as "the great
| instrument of reason, which will carry the forces of the mind
| further than the microscope has carried those of sight". Later he
| wrote:
|
| >>>The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as
| tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our
| error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we
| can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see who
| is right.[1]
|
| I'm also kind of surprised that Hooke wrote the letter in
| English, since I assumed all academic communication across
| language barriers back then would have been in Latin. But ChatGPT
| tells me Leibniz was unusually multi-lingual.
|
| [1] Sorry, ad-heavy site but I wanted one that gave context:
| https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/let-us-calculate-leibni...
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Leibniz invented binary -- so he kind of succeeded in his
| quest.
|
| He based it on the Chinese iching, interestingly enough...
| SilasX wrote:
| He was ahead of his time, definitely, and binary logic is one
| critical step in getting there, but we're a long way from
| having a formal language to represent all claims that would
| ever arise in human argumentation to the point that it's
| simply a matter of calculation to resolve them.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| He didn't actually base it on the Yiching, he just noticed
| that it could be expressed neatly in binary. But he had come
| up with binary code before that.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Hooke introduced the effects of cannabis ("an account of the
| plant") to the Royal Society and sometimes I wonder about that.
| Consider this amazingly dramatic title:
|
| "A General Scheme, or Idea of the Present State of Natural
| Philosophy, And how its Defects may be Remedied by a Methodical
| Proceeding in the Making Experiments and Collecting Observations
| whereby to Compile a Natural History, as the Solid Basis for the
| Superstructure of True Philosophy."
|
| (Try saying that title in one breath!)
|
| When it comes to cybernetics-- Hooke was a big fan of Cornelis
| Drebbel who designed and built the first cybernetic system (a
| self regulating oven) and a functional submarine (which produced
| oxygen by heating saltpetre), and a compound microscope, and
| chemical air conditioning, and the telescope that Galileo used to
| find the moons of Jupiter, and a perpetual motion machine based
| on harvesting barometric pressure changes, and...
| darepublic wrote:
| Sorry for the dumb question.. where is the transcript? I only see
| the link to the scanned letter
| forgetfulness wrote:
| The transcript doesn't seem to be finished, the part that the
| author uses to support their thesis is this excerpt in the
| article
|
| _"...especially in all those subjects where use of [such a
| language] may be free and where interest and authority do not
| intercept, the regular exercise thereof which I conceive to be
| the great antagonists which may impede its progress... "_
|
| "Hooke had some proto-liberal views" would be a more grounded
| interpretation.
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