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Is that how all "science" was written? It's nearly unreadable, the plot (Spirit?) lost in the language.

• analog31 1y ago
  In some sense, yes. I've seen portions of works by people like Newton etc. You had to be a philosopher to read them, much less understand them. In a lot of cases, the same "material" that we learn today required someone to come along later and work out a notation that we can read and teach. My favorite example is the Algebra of Al-Khwarizmi, which contained no numbers, much less equations, but was just a wall of text. In fact, equations were invented later. Also, I think the electromagnetism of Maxwell was reformulated into the equations that we love and cherish by Heaviside.
• dr_dshiv 1y ago
  The principa and the scholium were written in NeoLatin, the version of Latin adopted from the Renaissance through the 1900s to write scientific, philosophical and other treatises
• chowells 1y ago
  It's how a lot of science was written, and knowing that makes strong Sapir-Whorf a really funny joke. We didn't derive our ideas about science from our language. Developing our ideas of science shaped our language so it could communicate them efficiently. (Weak Sapir-Whorf is still a perfectly fine observation, but it's a lot less predictive as a hypothesis.)