In 1687 Sir Isaac Newton made a pretty compelling case for gravity — but it never hurts to get a second opinion.

Two weeks ago Cornell’s Prof. Hod Lipson, mechanical and aerospace engineering, and Michael Schmidt grad did just that when they unveiled a supercomputer that discovered Newton’s natural laws on its own.

The computer’s algorithm is so sophisticated that it can literally teach itself some of the most influential principles in the history of science without any prior knowledge of them.

Now, it is no secret that newspapers and other print media have been waging what seems to be a losing war against technology (mostly against free, internet-based media), and so I can’t help but wonder: How long will it be before Lipson invents an algorithm for writing columns?

Newspaper subscriptions are down, advertisers are buying less space and papers across the country are folding, while online media spreads through cyberspace like, well, a virus.

Many publishers are pointing accusing fingers at sites such as Google for high-jacking newspaper content without paying copyright fees, and Craigslist for “siphoning” money away by providing what is effectively a free “classifieds” section online.

Newspaper enthusiasts worry that the digital age may compromise the integrity of journalism as a whole if the alternative internet media sources gain the same kind of legitimacy as newspapers. After all, anybody can start a blog (or, incidentally, write for The Sun.)

There is no denying that this conflict is largely a generational one. While blogging is still a foreign concept in many older circles, it is natural frame of reference for the rest of us. Stephen Colbert recently addressed this disconnect when explaining to younger viewers that “a newspaper is like a blog that leaves ink on your hands.”

In commentary on the death of the newspaper, it is not a question of “if” but a question of “when.” Worried that the newspaper bubble may blow any second, papers are frantically trying to “go digital” in order to survive the fallout as some mutation of their former selves. One online paper in Pasadena, California has even fired all its American writers and outsourced completely to India to save money. Android journalists come next.

But, doomsday predictions aside, exactly how poorly is the newspaper industry actually doing?

As recently as 2005, American newspapers saw their largest annual revenues ever from advertising. And despite all the hysteria surrounding the death of the newspaper, only nine of 250 or so metropolitan dailies have folded in the last two years. The newspaper industry isn’t performing any worse than, say, the automotive industry. The only difference is Obama won’t bail out newspapers.

That said, more papers inevitably will fail, and the statistics I’ve cited do not take into account the innumerable employees laid off in order to prevent or postpone bankruptcy.

But it is important to remember that the current trend of papers dying is more closely tied to the economic downturn than to some kind of internet takeover.

Newspapers have been around for centuries: they have withstood the rise of news radio and then the rise of 24-hour news television, despite the fact that both vehicles were at one point identified as print-media killers. All the while, newspapers have maintained enormous social capital and popularity.

If we have learned anything from the arrival of radio and then television, it is that more access to information does not just create a more competitive market — it creates a smarter, more informed society.

There seems to be a belief that if youth were not getting the bulk of their news from blogs, they would be reading The New York Times. This simply isn’t true. The impact of social networking sites like Facebook in drumming up youth interest in politics over the last few years cannot be overstated. Those sites played no small role in producing a 2008 presidential youth vote that was the highest in four decades.

In other words, Twitter may be the gateway drug we all prayed for to hook the next generation of newspaper junkies.

The trick for most newspapers will be to weather this economic downturn while continuing to supplement print editions with online content. Under no circumstances should we do away with the print version of newspapers altogether.

While I avidly support having information freely available to all those who wish to find it — something the internet is unparalleled in providing — we still need a newspaper industry that can afford to pay its staff and fund investigative journalism and foster journalistic excellence.

Hopefully these extraordinarily hard times can serve as a wakeup call to publishers to put down the hatchet so that print media and internet-based media can work together to provide society with the best-quality journalism possible.

That is, of course, until a supercomputer renders the human journalist obsolete.

But we won’t have to worry about that for a long time, or at least until Lipson grows tired of physics.

And so, this being my last column of the semester, I wish everyone a happy, safe summer and take comfort in knowing that when I return to The Sun in the fall, I won’t have been replaced by R2D2.