Thoreau offers without qualification some observations about the different approach to books taken by sciences vs. humanities. Specifically, he notes that despite frequent claims that it is the Most Important Book Ever, nobody actually reads Newton’s Principia Mathematica
This is totally different from humanities. In humanities, people make a point of reading the original thinkers. They don’t just say “Well, philosopher so-and-so influenced lots of other people and got the ideas rolling, so let’s read somebody influenced by him and maybe a Cliff’s Notes version of the original.” They actually sit down and read the original, or a translation of the original.
I guess the difference is that humanities scholars are interested in people and ideas, while we evil fiziks types claim to be interested in the external world.
I always think of this in terms that were used during the discussion of our general education curriculum a few years ago. In talking about the content of the mandatory first and second year classes, people from the humanities and social sciences said many times that it was critical for students to learn the difference between primary and secondary texts. Many of us in the sciences sort of scratched our heads at that, because it’s not a distinction that comes up in the physical sciences.
The difference here is in what’s being studied. The physical sciences are studying the nature and behavior of the universe, which isn’t something that’s written down. The analogue of reading a primary source would be doing an experiment, not reading anything.
In most humanities disciplines, though, the text is the point. As a result, the distinction between primary and secondary sources is critical. The whole point of the business is to read and interpret primary sources– trying to produce humanities scholarship without reading the original texts is like trying to do science without experiment or observation. It’s the humanities equivalent of string theory.
Thus, I’m not terribly concerned about the failure to read original sources in physics. While there are sometimes advantages– the first paper presenting a new idea often explores it in more detail than subsequent articles– there are just as often disadvantages, as more modern notation and mathematical apparatus are often clearer and more compact than the original approach. Newton’s Principia is kind of a special case, too, as it’s famously difficult to follow, possibly deliberately.