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On The Shoulders Of Giants?
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This is the book you want. On the Shoulders of Giants. It has the work of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Einstein. It is a "slim" 1280 pages. And there are some used copies on Amazon for less than a cup of coffee!
If you're really interested I would suggest
https://www.amazon.com/Shoulders-Giants-Nicolaus-Copernicus/dp/076241698X
Where you can pick up a used copy for, well, less than a gallon of gas. Plus as a bonus, you'll also get the works of Copernicus, Galileo, and Einstein.
Now is it useful? Maybe from a historical perspective, but modern mathematics hadn't been fully developed, so many of the proofs are geometrical and equations are expressed as words and terminology doesn't match with modern usage. You could easily spend an hour trying to understand what one page means.
Yes Newton said it too, but that's what gave Stephen Hawking the title to his book, in which he says and shows the works of who he thinks were the biggest contributors to science as a whole throughout the ages. https://www.amazon.com/Shoulders-Giants-Nicolaus-Copernicus/dp/076241698X
Funny timing, as I just started reading this today, which quite naturally begins with Copernicus's "On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres". But now I wonder if it's even worth reading any further, since it's clearly all wrong.
If you are interested in the concept of shared thought, you would probably be interested in the idea of higher reality; specially, "unified mind" theories.
In regard to unified minds, there are a lot of different theories and not all of them involve material reality (though some do). A lot of those theories have been kidnapped by new age weirdos though, so it's difficult to find topics on it that are interesting to normal people.
Alchemy is one field of study that looks at higher realities and unified minds; but like the theory as a whole, it has been bombarded with new age lunatics.
One interesting idea about unified thought I came across is that of "process reality," which basically consists of things that cannot be measured, but whose results can be monitored. Also called "things that just happen without reason, because." Like gravity. We can view a lot of the effects of gravity, but there's only so much we can measure. And if we move beyond the concept of gravity, there will be a new system we know nothing about. And even when we have the answer, there still won't be an answer to the question "why?" It just happens and cannot be measured.
I don't mean that nothing can be measured; the results can be measured. People know about atomic mass and how much pull that creates on other objects in space (or even when clumped together). People know that. But they can't actually see it.
Basically, it is the idea that "some things just happen and there's no reason. It's nature. There doesn't have to be a reason." But some people think that maybe there is reason, but no one has found it yet, or even glimpsed all of the results of it.
The problem is, this sounds a lot like religion, which in a sense it is (seeking the unknowable; trying to find something that may not exist at all). The difference is, there isn't any associations with morality or your personal actions in regard to this idea. It also doesn't address the "afterlife." It's something that just "is."
It's also a lot like the scientific process. Just because we know a lot of stuff about gravity does not mean we should not question it and expand our idea of it. That's very scientific. Theoretical physics deals (at times) with materials that may or may not exist, which we may or may not be able to measure with our current technology.
If you're a math nerd, I would highly recommend On The Shoulders Of Giants to see how scientists of the past used math to address questions similar to your own true pursuit, though (arguably) looking more at the physical world to do so.
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