On the boredom of science: positional astronomy in the nineteenth century
- 7 November 2013
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in The British Journal for the History of Science
- Vol. 47 (3) , 479-503
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s0007087413000915
Abstract
To those not engaged in the practice of scientific research, or telling the story of this enterprise, the image of empirical observation may conjure up images of boredom more than anything else. Yet surprisingly, the profoundly uninteresting nature of research to many science workers and readers in history has received little attention. This paper seeks to examine one moment of encroaching boredom: nineteenth-century positional astronomy as practised at leading observatories. Though possibly a coincidence, this new form of astronomical observation arose only a few decades before the English term ‘boredom’, for which the Oxford English Dictionary has no record prior to 1850. Through examining forms of observatory labour and publications, I offer in this paper an example of how boring work and reading helped shape a scientific discipline.Keywords
This publication has 25 references indexed in Scilit:
- How Science Became TechnicalIsis, 2009
- John Couch Adams's Asperger syndrome and the British non-discovery of NeptuneNotes and Records, 2007
- Constant differences: Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, the concept of the observer in early nineteenth-century practical astronomy and the history of the personal equationThe British Journal for the History of Science, 2007
- The Fading Star of the Paris Observatory in the Nineteenth Century: Astronomers' Urban Culture of Circulation and ObservationOsiris, 2003
- Exit the frog, enter the human: physiology and experimental psychology in nineteenth-century astronomyThe British Journal for the History of Science, 2001
- The Cambridge Network in Action: The Discovery of NeptuneIsis, 1989
- Astronomers Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal EquationScience in Context, 1988
- Beyond the planets: early nineteenth-century studies of double starsThe British Journal for the History of Science, 1984
- Amateurs and Astrophysics: A Neglected Aspect in the Development of a Scientific SpecialtySocial Studies of Science, 1981
- Third catalogue of variable starsThe Astronomical Journal, 1896