Raphael G. Satter, AP Writer

LONDON — The notes of 17th-century researcher Robert Hooke were posted on the Internet on Monday, opening an online window into the man who helped drive Britain's scientific revolution and laying bare his professional rivalries with the likes of Sir Isaac Newton.

The notes, lost for centuries before their discovery in 2005, cast new light on developments at Britain's Royal Society, where scientists discussed microscopes, micro-organisms, and planetary motion.

Royal Society scholars called the find "one of those discoveries that historians of science dream of."

"Hooke's manuscripts give us an insight into the intellectual wonder and excitement during the 16th and 17th century," said Lisa Jardine, a Hooke biographer who led the effort to transcribe his notes. "Science in the modern sense was about to be born."

The notes disappeared in the 17th century before they were discovered gathering dust in a house in England. They were due to go up for auction, but the Royal Society managed to raise $2 million to buy them.

Now the Royal Society has posted them online, where users can flip through them with the same software used to browse Leonardo da Vinci's sketches and Jane Austen's early writings on the British Library Web site.

The manuscripts carry minutes, drawings and diagrams, detailing some of the earliest work with microscopes and the first studies of sperm and micro-organisms.

They also give a glimpse of Hooke's contentious relationship with his peers.

In an acerbic aside on Hooke's predecessor as secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg, Hooke wrote that the man "did me all the mischief he could." And about an entry describing a presentation by Robert Boyle — sometimes described as the father of modern chemistry — Hooke scribbled: "stolen from me."

The notes also cover discussions of gravity with Isaac Newton — who did not mention Hooke in the preface to his book "Principia."

Hooke was born in 1635, and his studies in a number of fields made a major contribution to science and the understanding of it. But the only innovation to bear his name is Hooke's Law, on the physics of springs — the shortest law in physics — which states that extension is proportional to force.

However, he also suggested the existence of gravitational vortices that pulled comets from their obit and invented the reflecting telescope, the sextant, the wind gauge and the wheel barometer.

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On the Net:

Royal Society: http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk

http://www.newsvine.com/