> In England around 1650 coffee houses became the favourite meeting places of the English scientific intelligentsia, the astronomers, mathematicians and natural philosophers. Here, these savants would meet up to exchange ideas, discuss the latest scientific theories and pose challenges to each other.
Why don't we have coffee houses like this today? I'd go. You could argue that the web is the modern-day version of this, but I've never heard of such coffee houses in the decades years immediately before the web (1970s, 80s, 90s), so it's not like the web displaced them. EDIT: To be clear, I don't think the web is good replacement. So I'm puzzled why we don't have these kind of coffee houses anymore.
What would you say to a coffee shop, open late, with intelligent speakers, animal exhibits, autopsies[1], science experiments, all kinds of talks, painting lessons, something different every night, lots of random and interesting things to try and rekindle the intellectual coffee shop of old England?
[1] Well maybe not this one, but a Victorian-era coffee shop actually did do some public autopsies.
I studied in Vienna which was the origin of the western coffee culture after the Ottoman siege on its gates. Viennese coffee houses to this day have that "public living room" flair to them, as do the greek καφενεíο: you get one coffe and stay for hours. You read, you talk, and then after hours you get another one or leave.
Many other places will try to get you out after you finished your drink and they want you to finish the drink fast. This means instead of being social places of interaction where additionally you can get a coffee many modern cafés have become places of consumption that you should leave rather fast unless you are consuming continuously.
In Miami there is a bar called Churchill’s (Sometimes called the CBGBs of the South) in Little Haiti, not exactly the safest neighborhood in the world But that only adds to its charm.
On Monday nights for god knows how long they have had jazz nights on the inside and open mic nights on the outside. Not mathematical and scientific pursuits, but the greatest art I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing being created before my eyes And to me that makes it a place of intellectual pursuits (I’ve always called it the future of culture).
Just as an example I believe Marylin Manson had his official debut at churchill’s. I once watched a kid (wouldn’t be surprised if he was 17 and still in high school) walk up on stage in a dress with a harmonica and guitar...and I’d swear he’d give bob dylan a run for his money. And in all likelihood no one will even know this kids name or be moved/influenced by his music. One of the important things to take away from this article is the reality Newton was in his 40’s before he was “discovered“ living in near isolation as a unregarded professor and it was by happenstance Newton became Sir Newton (having already solved a problem his peer happened to be discussing and the challenge issued).
My insight would actually be these types of groups are everywhere, getting together and discussing and pursuing their passions with other likeminded people, it’s just unless you share the same passion or they are lucky enough to be discovered and transcend to be embraced by society at large they will simply be lost to history like Newton might have been.
Be the change you want to see in the world, I’d start maybe by going to a local university (covid may complicate this) and personally invite a number of professors from various fields to the campus bar for an open mic night. MC it but don’t put any restrictions, if they want to talk about work fine, if they want to read their own poetry fine, I think you’ll be surprised how quickly people in such an environment will share their unknown and undiscovered talents.
When I read "In Miami there is...", I was half expecting to read about your experience at the Lab (https://www.thelabmiami.com/) which shares space with Arts for Learning http://www.a4lmiami.org/ and Miami Light Project https://miamilightproject.com/. Open mics twice a month. Not to mention once-a-month Nerd Night at Gramps around the corner. I had almost forgotten about Churchill's when I started hanging out in Wynwood more.
Over the years, I have bumped into fellow Hacker Newers in all of these places.
I didn't realize how spoiled we must be here in Miami (but not at the moment). Thanks for the reminder, throwaway!
Unfortunately, that sounds like the kind of place that would immediately show up in the Lonely Planet, and tourists would flock to the place to "experience the unique intellectual atmosphere and charm of this quaint one-of-a-kind science cafe." It wouldn't be long before the intellectuals start to prefer the Starbucks across the street.
They exist, though these kinds of events are not profitable so they can be hard to find. My best advice for finding one is to look for community run shops that offer live music, they sometimes have a variety of events. Local book stores are also a good place to check.
> Why don't we have coffee houses like this today? I'd go. You could argue that the web is the modern-day version of this
No, I disagree. The web is not a replacement for normal social interaction. Zoom is not a replacement for in person meetings. The web does not replace an actual coffee shop, and social media or email does not replace a phone call.
Unfortunately, our newest adult generation will never understand what beauties there were in life before people only communicated electronically.
That's just nostalgia, electronic communication is in many ways better than face to face, even if it is worse in others. Electronic communication allows you to communicate with the specialist in your field, located in the other side of the world. It is constantly available thanks to smartphones. If you have a great idea, you can share it immediately, if your phone is waterproof, you don't even need to leave your shower. You can ask question and get answer within seconds when you are working on your subject.
Pandemic aside, our "newest adult generation" still can meet in real life. But they are now able to take advantage of both electronic and face-to-face communication with a level of expertise older generations don't have, and better manage potential distractions.
I don't worry about them, not on that subject anyways. They are perfectly able to understand the beauties in life, like every human did since humans existed. It is just that times change and people adapt.
I understand your point, even if I do disagree somewhat. While the freedom to interact in ways that are not electronic is still an option, it is such a tiny fraction of the choices most people make when communicating, that the presence of this option almost seems irrelevant.
> Electronic communication allows you to communicate with
the specialist in your field
Which makes it less likely you will communicate with someone closer to your level. The specialist will be inundated, whereas perfectly fruitful conversations with merely competent/slightly expert people will not happen. You are a lot more likely to know the famous experts than you are to know very good people in the field who are right in your (or any) backyard. A dense network of communications will likely generate better ideas than those centered around very few specialists.
> It is constantly available thanks to smartphones.
Time sink spent on sites like the Math stackexchange, etc at all possible hours. With a coffee house, you have a dedicated time, and you cannot utilize it outside of those few hours. This frees up your mind to ponder and create. With "constantly available", you can spend all your time on it.
> If you have a great idea, you can share it immediately,
This is a huge problem for two reasons: 1. It leads to way too many false positives. I reckon most such ideas are flawed, and you would have discovered the flaws if you had waited a few hours/days to share it. 2. Spending the time to curate your idea, formulate it well, etc is much more effective than simply messaging out your half baked idea (even if the idea is a good one).
> You can ask question and get answer within seconds when you are working on your subject.
This is the same anti-feature and is why when I worked in teams where we were colocated, I would keep my IM off at work (sometimes for months at a time). If people wanted to talk to me, they could email me if it's not urgent otherwise they would have to walk to my cube and interrupt me (I don't mind these interruptions). This worked well for 2 reasons: 1. They are much more conscious of interrupting me, so they will think more before deciding to interrupt me. 2: Just that extra physical motion of getting up and walking would be enough for their brains to figure out the solution on the way to my cube.
You could very well argue that some people have the discipline and skills to manage all the problems above. In my experience, they are in a minority, and a smaller proportion of the population can/will manage them compared to the old days.
> But they are now able to take advantage of both electronic and face-to-face communication with a level of expertise older generations don't have, and better manage potential distractions.
Very much disagree on "better manage potential distractions." We have an order of magnitude more distractions, and looking around I see that most people are doing a very poor job of managing them.
And its not either or. You can have both side by side or just one or the other. It depends on your Personality type and Needs.
We are born unconscious of both. And take time to learn them. And learning about the needs and personality types of others and realizing there is a huge spectrum that has nothing to do with yours takes even longer.
So making contact with Beauty is never confined to how someone else did it. Its good to be aware of all the routes though. And sample as many as you can.
Notwithstanding your condescending tone of stating something obvious to me as a question, I’m not talking about the pandemic at all. The majority of communication between people is electronic now, messaging, email, the Internet as a whole. You have to go back nearly a couple of decades really to see teenagers (or many adults) who are not glued to their phones and primarily communicating in a digital way. And with regards to the OP, you certainly can’t replicate an intellectual coffeehouse digitally.
It’s unfortunate, because the raw improvised social interaction of recent eras past is forever gone, and the newer generations will never know what they missed.
I'm being condescending because your point is just another repackaging of the classic "back in my day" argument. People these days use electronic devices to communicate, yes, but they also meet face-to-face, and go grab lunch and coffee just like people used to in the past. There's nothing especially "raw" or "improvised" about social interaction in the past.
True, but I don't think the average person back then had much idle time either. And a lot of those who did were willing (or perhaps did not have a choice) to have much lower standards of living. I don't mean all the modern conveniences - I mean things like consistent roof on head, consistent food on table, etc.
I reckon if one is willing to sacrifice those two today, they could have much idle time. I knew at least one chronically homeless person for whom I think this is a barrier to getting back to a normal life. Idle time is addictive. I don't think he became homeless decades ago to gain more idle time, but he did get accustomed to it.
> True, but I don't think the average person back then had much idle time either.
I think this gets to the heart of it. The people hanging out in the cages in the article were not the average person. They were almost invariably well-to-do people who didn't need to work for a living. Free time and some security from harm against potential failures (or wastes of time) are two ingredients for innovation. The majority of our technological innovators come from priveleged backgrounds, for that reason (in addition to money granting them access to the right education, networks and technology).
> Why don't we have coffee houses like this [the favourite meeting places of the English scientific intelligentsia, the astronomers, mathematicians and natural philosophers] today?
I can tell you where the scientists are. They are sitting in their offices writing the next grant application. And if they aren't, going to hang out at the coffee shop with other scientists is not a line item on their CV that contributes towards their tenure application.
I would say dang would have even more work to do, keeping up with the discussions around animal exhibits, autopsies, science experiments, all kinds of talks, painting lessons, something different every night, lots of random and interesting things, all in real time and between coffees.
(to what degree was the coffee shop the public-access commercially-supported more hands-on version of the salon?)
The incentives are against it. Legal issues, corporate "governance", patents, IP, publish-or-perish all reward information hoarding and secretive experimentation.
You’re absolutely right. I’d go. Coffee shop as event places would be great to have. On a general note, I feel retail space usage has not been reinvented frequently. Apple being a big exception.
> Why don't we have coffee houses like this today?
It's called the pub.
It is socially acceptable to shoot the shit with complete strangers at a bar, especially if you're at the bar on a stool; less so between tables where it's usually a group of friends that are gathered.
More generally: people go to these types of establishments often to meet friends, so it is generally impolite to intrude on their conversation.
Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle is set in this era. Newton, Hooke, Wren, Leibniz and many others all appear as characters. It’s a 2800 page monster, but a treat if you enjoy historical fiction and the history of ideas.
Coffee culture and all the other bits of innovation and turmoil of the Enlightenment. Church vs State, Kings vs Commerce.
This epic fiction was completed some time in 2004, Tulips and Beanie Babies had crashed hard but there was far more coffee yet to drink, and junk residential mortgages had yet to destroy the world...
The characters of 1700 trying to make sense of this new thing called "money", its first derivative called "currency", and ever more abstruse instruments "bank notes" (what is a bank?). Mutual shares in associations of investors of "insurance", "corporations", or even trade in those things to form "stock markets".
And here you are, trying to explain the blockchain to your Mom.
Yes. Baroque Cycle is a true monster and varies in quality but I stuck with it for superb perspective on the birth of the modern age, and some of leading scientific rivalries of the time (e.g. Newton vs. Leibniz). As well as the beginnings of science, it also considers the creation of modern finance systems.
At the risk of opening up the standard argument about the quality of the endings in Stephenson's books, I thought that the [spoiler-omitted: technology] conclusion of the third book in the cycle, although not particularly dramatic, is an excellent counterpart to the [spoiler-omitted: superstition] beginning of the first book.
It's entertaining, but the tone and atmosphere are so anachronistic. I like historical fiction that gives more of a sense of the alienness of past societies.
Here's a translated quote from the novel 三国演义, per Wikipedia:
"Brothers are like limbs, wives and children are like clothing. Torn clothing can be repaired; how can broken limbs be mended?"
Atoav above described this culture in Viennese coffee houses where "you get one coffee and stay for hours."
I have seen this environment at a small university town where I used to live. You overhear all sorts of interesting conversations ranging from the middle school kids who walk there after school to professors researching antibiotic resistance.
Who did Isaac Newton credit with the discovery of the inverse square law of gravity? He specifically claimed it was Pythagoras, 6th century BC mathematician, who showed the inverse square relationship in the tension of a musical string and in the "harmony of the Spheres". The Pythagoreans are remembered for their belief that the world is made of math ("all is number") -- something that Newton did much to prove in his Principia.
> Newton had delivered up a mathematical proof that an elliptical orbit would be produced by an inverse square force situated at one of the foci of the ellipse, thus combining the inverse square law of gravity with Kepler’s first law.
Then, the source quote from Newton's Principia:
"For Pythagoras, as Macrobius avows, stretched the intestines of sheep or the sinews of oxen by attaching various weights, and from this learned the ratio of the celestial harmony. Therefore, by means of such experiments he ascertained that the weights by which all tones on equal strings .. were reciprocally as the squares of the lengths of the string by which the musical instrument emits the same tones. But the proportion discovered by these experiments, on the evidence of Macrobius, he applied to the heavens and consequently by comparing those weights with the weights of the Planets and the lengths of the strings with the distances of the Planets, he understood by means of the harmony of the heavens that the weights of the Planets towards the Sun were reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the Sun."
Very interesting. Wouldn't such reasoning serve as evidence for the heliocentric model, which I thought was known as a theory but not generally accepted at the time of Pythagoras?
Aristotle makes fun of the Pythagorean proposal that there might be a counter-earth orbiting on the other side of the sun, so it can never be seen. But if you think about it, that's only possible in a heliocentic worldview. Coperinicus, at least, believed that the Pythagoreans believed in heliocentrism:
Fascinating, I didn’t realize Newton was into his 40s before he made any specific contributions that led to his larger widespread influence. I just assumed that, like most of the greatest scientists in history, he was in his 20s when he changed the world.
He worked on some of those things in 1666 but did not publish anything. That is kind of the point of the article. Newton had a lot of reluctance around publication; he did not follow modern norms.
I wonder how much of those things he actually figured out in his 20s and just did not publish, versus thinking about them without drawing many conclusions or making significant progress until he actually published 20 years later?
I like to imagine that someone somewhere is currently immersed in their own annus mirabilis and the fruits of those discoveries will be a silver lining to this terrible pandemic.
1/3 of London burned down in 1666. It was right at the end of the great plague of London. Wren and Hooke were put in charge of rebuilding the city.
Hooke was the "techie" who could actually engineer and build many of the experiments in the Royal Society. As founding member, he was made "chief curator", responsible for producing the empirical demonstrations.
To learn more about the relationship between Newton and Hooke, I recommend "An Unpublished Letter of Robert Hooke to Isaac Newton" BY ALEXANDRE KOYRE, 1952
"Hooke who, as Curator of Experiments of the Royal Society, was supposed "to furnish the Society every day
[they met once a week] with three or four considerable experiments"
"The registers of the Royal Society testify to the eagerness with which Hooke hurried from one inquiry to another with brilliant but inconclusive results. Among those which early engaged his attention were the nature of the air, its function in respiration and combustion, specific weights, the law of falling bodies, the improvement of land-carriage and diving bells, methods of telegraphy and the relations of barometrical readings to changes in the weather. He measured the vibrations of a pendulum two hundred feet long attached to the steeple of St. Paul; invented a useful machine for cutting the teeth of watch-wheels; fixed the thermometer zero at freezing-point of water; and ascertained (in July I664) the number of vibrations corresponding to musical notes"
On a tour of a London they mentioned that everyone wanted Wren to design (build?) their churches after the fire. There were too many to manage, so he made them a bargain: church first, steeples after all the churches are done.
Why don't we have coffee houses like this today? I'd go. You could argue that the web is the modern-day version of this, but I've never heard of such coffee houses in the decades years immediately before the web (1970s, 80s, 90s), so it's not like the web displaced them. EDIT: To be clear, I don't think the web is good replacement. So I'm puzzled why we don't have these kind of coffee houses anymore.
What would you say to a coffee shop, open late, with intelligent speakers, animal exhibits, autopsies[1], science experiments, all kinds of talks, painting lessons, something different every night, lots of random and interesting things to try and rekindle the intellectual coffee shop of old England?
[1] Well maybe not this one, but a Victorian-era coffee shop actually did do some public autopsies.