2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

Matthew␣ H. Edney University of Southern Maine
HSS Abstracts
Mapping Eighteenth-Century Intersections
of Scientific and Cartographic Practices
Cartographic practices have always featured, sometimes prominently, in general
histories of Enlightenment science. They are most obvious in accounts of
eighteenth-century attempts to measure the size and shape of the earth and to
determine the longitude at sea they provide a persistent context for all
reconnaissance expeditions from the metropolitan centers to the European and
colonial margins and they served as a conceptual device for organizing and
rationalizing observations of spatial phenomena. The relationship between
cartography and science can thus be approached in a number of different ways,
and at different scales: the individual (e.g., astronomers who happened also to
make maps) the institutional (e.g., scientific academies) the social (e.g., the
marketplace within which scientific and cartographic texts were disseminated and
sold) and, the cultural (e.g., the use of “map” as a metaphor for botanical taxonomy).
This paper provides, from the standpoint of cartographic history, a preliminary
framework within which to organize these many different elements. Recognizing
that there is nothing essential about either “science” or “cartography,” this paper
will begin by exploring the principal modes of eighteenth-century cartography
(defined in terms of their spatial conceptions, technologies, social institutions, and
cultural expectations). From there the task will be to determine the most significant
intersections—in practices (e.g., instrumentation) and attitudes (e.g., the
“quantifying spirit” )—of mapping activities with those of the sciences. At worst,
discussion, with historians of science, of the flaws in this (admittedly ambitious)
framework, will stimulate a much needed interdisciplinary exchange. At best, this
framework will provide a basis for further explorations in the intermingling practices
and ideals of mapping and science.
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Joann Eisberg Independent Scholar/Citrus College
Making a Science of Observational Cosmology:
The Cautious Optimism of Beatrice Tinsley
Until recent decades, cosmology has seemed to all but its advocates to be a
game rather than a science. Many astronomers complained that it was all theory
and no data. The problem was that cosmological effects were expected to manifest
themselves only at distances too great to be observed. From the 1950s and 1960s,
however, a subset of the astronomy and physics communities argued that certain
very bright objects—galaxies and quasars—could be seen to such great distances
that they might eventually serve as cosmological benchmarks to measure the
universe as a whole. Most workers agreed, however, that galaxies and quasars
were so poorly understood that any attempt to apply their observation to
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