Tag Archives: history of science

Cutting a dash: men of science as ‘historical hotties’

Posted on May 17, 2012 by

I had a bit of fun this week tweeting links to portraits of some 19th-century men of science, suggesting that they were ’19thC scientific hotties’. Such a phrase is not, I should add, my usual vocabulary, and nor is a … Continue reading →

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Inside a Herbarium (finding history amongst the science)

Posted on April 6, 2012 by

This week I had the pleasure of seeing inside the Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. I have, very often and from earliest childhood, enjoyed walking in the gardens and hothouses, but this was the first time I … Continue reading →

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Tartu: “the Russian Empire’s leading observatory”

Posted on March 26, 2012 by

My review of Lea Leppick’s Tartu Old Observatory (2011), appeared in the  February 2012 issue (£) of the Journal for the History of Astronomy. You can read it here.

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There was no such thing as the Longitude Prize

Posted on March 7, 2012 by

As a result of the old question “Did Harrison win the Longitude Prize?”, and recent discussions on Twitter, started by Marcus du Sautoy here (he had been filming with the Royal Observatory’s Senior Specialist in Horology, Jonathan Betts, that day) … Continue reading →

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Wanting to believe

Posted on February 6, 2012 by

Sometimes, the extent to which people see what they wish to see seems truly remarkable. However, we shouldn’t be surprised that this very human affliction affects even those with a training or long practice in observation and logic. An article in … Continue reading →

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The place of science in history and history in science

Posted on January 30, 2012 by

As an historian of science working between two museum sites and with people researching or communicating both history and science, I often feel I’m a stuck-record, piggy-in-the-middle, harping on to the historians to pay attention to the science and the … Continue reading →

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The active observatory

Posted on January 24, 2012 by

The following review was written for the new Science Studies section of the website Dissertation Reviews, and can also be read there. It is an outline of Alistair Kwan’s Architectures of astronomical observation: from Sternwarte Kassel (circa 1560) to the Radcliffe … Continue reading →

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