2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
the map projection, the mathematical graticule, betray the impossibility of
any transcendental orientation before or outside of experience? This proposition
will be examined with respect to theories of map projection and the survey of
Hanover organized by Tobias Mayer and Georg Lichtenberg at Göttingen Georg
Forster’s Göttingen-based compilations of travel literature his essay on “Cook
der Entdecker” and his debate with Kant over the authority of travellers’ reports.
David␣ H. DeVorkin Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum
Bringing Theory to Mount Wilson in the 1920s
When George Ellery Hale established his Mount Wilson Solar Observatory in
1904, his primary intellectual goal was to build a staff of astrophysicists fully
acquainted with the latest developments and methodologies in physics. Over
the next decade, as he built the two successively largest telescopes in the world,
Hale remained firm in his conviction, but failed time and again to attract strong
physics to his isolated Mount Wilson telescopes and laboratories in Pasadena.
With the establishment in 1919 of the NRC postdoctoral fellowship program
for physics and chemistry, and then in 1924 of the International Education
Board (IEB) fellowships, all fuelled by Rockefeller money, a mechanism was
in place to attract the best young theorists to Pasadena, where Hale had also
transformed a small technical school into the California Institute of Technology
and placed it in the hands of Robert A. Millikan. Thus what Hale set into
motion for largely astrophysical motives resulted in the creation of a major
new center for pure physics, where leading European physical theorists would
visit, and send their students, to gain access to the best astrophysical data in
the world. Here I discuss the impact upon Mount Wilson and upon theoretical
astrophysics resulting from the residencies of European theorists, specifically
Svein Rosseland, a student of Bohr, and Albrecht Unsöld, a student of
Sommerfeld, in the 1920s.
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Nicholas Dew Cambridge University
The Menagerie of Versailles and the Visualisation of Nature
The project to rebuild the palace of Versailles got under way in the 1660s,
and even before the court had arrived, the gardens were stocked with exotic
birds and animals. The menagerie of Versailles presents a striking example
of the marriage of ‘curiosity’ and ‘magnificence’, or the ways in which the
practice of natural investigation in seventeenth-century Europe could profit
from the spectacular culture of the princely court. The animals at the
menagerie were dissected by members of the Académie royale des sciences
and thereby became the stars of the sumptuous Memoires pour servir à