Tag Archives: herschel

The Moon Hoaxing Scandal of 1835

Herschell pictured on a papier mache box lid at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford (Photo: Tim Jones)

The fantastic weather in Oxford yesterday meant museum visits took a back seat to a good punting session on the Cherwell (a violation of physics in its own right with me at the helm).

Oxford (Photo:Tim Jones)
Oxford

But we did get a half hour in the Museum of the History of Science , where I snapped this papier mache box lid, a great early example of newspapers not letting facts get in the way of a good story.  For what they lacked in hacking scandals in 1835, they made up for in hoaxing, in stories like the one to which this exhibit relates: The Great Moon Hoax.

The picture is a satirical sketch of the astronomer Sir John Herschel, in a scene based on a series of reports by Richard Adams Locke for the New York Sun in 1835, supposedly describing observations made by Herschel at his South Africa observatory.

From the New York Sun 1835 (Wikicommons)

You can read up on the detail at the museum of hoaxes), but in this rendition, which is new to me, I particularly like the weird equipment combo Herschel’s minions are wielding around him: some sort of camera obscura / microscope mash-up by the looks of things.  Maybe those instruments were more familiar than telescopes?   Or, more likely, the  journo just let his imagination get the better of him.  Either way, I guess it’s still the little winged moon-men that steal the show.

The exhibit put me in mind of two lectures on a similar tack I enjoyed in the Royal Society’s History of Science series.   You might like to check them out:

‘Fleas, lice, and an elephant on the moon’  by Dr Felicity Henderson (Sept 24 2010)

‘The Telescope at 400: a Satirical Journey’ by Richard Dunn (April 24 2009)

(both can be found by tracking down to the correct dates at the Royal Society podcast/vidcast page here).

 

 

 

Royal Institution Speaker Calls for an End To Culture Wars

Yesterday evening at the Royal Institution, I watched the respected biographer and academic Richard Holmes make an empassioned plea for an end to the ‘two cultures’ rift between science and the arts – a reference  to the term coined by CP Snow in his Rede Lecture of 1959.

Coleridge with his biographer, Richard Holmes, at the RI last night.  Photo Sven Klinge
Coleridge with his biographer, Richard Holmes, at the RI last night. (Photo Sven Klinge)

In a packed auditorium, familiar as the venue for the annual Christmas Lectures, Holmes challenged his hosts to do their bit by including humanities speakers as a fixture in the RI lecture programme.   He certainly held the historical high ground, sharing a daiz occupied in another age by Sir Humphrey Davey, Michael Faraday and significantly the poet Samuel Coleridge.

Faraday at the Royal Institution
Faraday at the Royal Institution

Dipping into his new book The Age of Wonder, Holmes used the lives and achievements of explorers like Sir Joseph Banks and the romantic polymath Erasmus Darwin (grandfather to Charles) to illustrate an age when science and art moved together to their mutual benefit.  He continued through the lives of the Herschels: from William and Catherine and the discovery of Uranus, to Catherine’s formative influence on the young John Herschel.  Then on to Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday, finishing with Charles Darwin in the mid-nineteenth century.   Readers who enjoyed hearing about Joseph Banks’s culturally sensitive integration activities in this earlier post on the Otaheite Dog, will find more revelations in the same vein in Age of Wonder.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Holmes  bemoaned the lack of general access to source texts, including Banks’s Endeavour Journal and Darwin’s Botanic Garden – another sign of the literary/science imbalance of two cultures thinking.  Both of these works are wonderful pieces of literature as well as scientific documents.   The Botanic garden is a compendium of virtually all 18th century science expressed as poetry, in a format where the footnotes are as inspiring as the main text.    The good news is that both are available online.

Richard Holmes (Photo courtesy Sven Klinge)
Richard Holmes (Photo courtesy Sven Klinge)
Age of Wonder
Age of Wonder

Holmes believes that if there there was one event more than any other that influenced Snow’s proclamation on the two cultures, it was the horrific association of science with the atomic bomb.   An audience member blamed the divide in the UK on the arts/science choices students were forced to make at A-Level.   Whatever the reason, Holmes’s comments are a timely introduction to a week in which the two cultures theme figures large, with as part of the London Consortium’s Art and Science Now Programme,  a mix of all-day conference sessions and receptions  scheduled at the Wellcome Institute on Thursday, the Science Museums’s Dana Centre on Friday, and the  Tate Modern Art Gallery on  Saturday.  More on those later.

UPDATE:  My report on the Art and Science Now ‘Two Cultures’ event is HERE