The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia
&gt; <i>In England around 1650 coffee houses became the favourite meeting places of the English scientific intelligentsia, the astronomers, mathematicians and natural philosophers. Here, these savants would meet up to exchange ideas, discuss the latest scientific theories and pose challenges to each other.</i><p>Why don&#x27;t we have coffee houses like this today? I&#x27;d go. You could argue that the web is the modern-day version of this, but I&#x27;ve never heard of such coffee houses in the decades years immediately before the web (1970s, 80s, 90s), so it&#x27;s not like the web displaced them. EDIT: To be clear, I don&#x27;t think the web is good replacement. So I&#x27;m puzzled why we don&#x27;t have these kind of coffee houses anymore.<p>What would you say to a coffee shop, open late, with intelligent speakers, animal exhibits, autopsies[1], science experiments, all kinds of talks, painting lessons, something different every night, lots of random and interesting things to try and rekindle the intellectual coffee shop of old England?<p>[1] Well maybe not this one, but a Victorian-era coffee shop actually did do some public autopsies.