Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz

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…

It doesn't particularly matter, but it looks to me as if there are a couple of errors in the fragment of transcript provided by the author.

It says "the regular exercise thereof" where the scan looks to me much more like "the regular course thereof".

And -- this one is smaller but gave me more trouble -- there's a misplaced comma: it should be after "thereof", not after "intercept". (The sentence structure is a bit weird even with the comma in the right place, but having it in the wrong place makes it even more confusing.)

>> Cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction about high tech, urban sprawl, and do-it-yourself counterculture.

Those are the superficial signifiers, not a constructive definition of the genre.

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.

Sorry for the dumb question.. where is the transcript? I only see the link to the scanned letter

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

>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...

if we could find characters or signs appropriate for expressing all our thoughts

Precursor to De Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater as axiomatic Euclidean geometry.

[1]:https://archive.org/details/confessionsofeng01dequ/page/n2/m...