My ICHS nightmare.

If you are attending this year’s history of science and all the rest monster bean feast in Manchester in July and are holding a lecture there for the first time in your life at a major conference then I recommend that you stop reading this post.

In 1980 I moved from Britain to German and made my home there. It was a move that was determined by a random chain of events rather than any sort of positive decision. Once settled in Germany I needed to do a series of things such as, for example, find work or learn the language. After some time I found out that the best German as a foreign language course available locally was at the University in Erlangen not far from where I was living at the time. Upon investigation I discovered that to enrol in the course I first had to enrol in the university in a regular course of study. Now I was a classic nineteen seventies drop out who had originally studied archaeology in Cardiff but who had always intended to return to university when I had discovered what I really wanted to study. Now the time seemed to have come for me to resume my academic career and I enrolled in the university to study mathematics with philosophy as my subsidiary subject and after a year of learning German I became a mature maths student studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, in those days the first degree in Germany.

Now my principle interest in mathematics was in its history for which the Erlangen maths institute had little interest but by a strange twist of fate my philosophy professor was a practicing historian of mathematics. After three years, at about bachelor’s level, I dropped mathematics and took up philosophy, concentrating on history and philosophy of science, as my major with English philology and history as my subsidiaries. By now my philosophy professor had asked me if I wished to work in a research project into the external history of mathematical logic, a chance I jumped at and which became my apprenticeship as a historian of science. I worked in this project in total for around ten years.

In 1989 the International Congress for the History of Science XVIII (ICHS), as it was then, came to Germany and because they couldn’t decide which city should have the privilege of putting it on, the first half took place in Hamburg and the second in Munich, the two of them a mere 790 kilometres apart. Not only did we attend but our research project was a section in its own right with legendary Dutch-American Marxist historian of mathematics Dirk Struik, then 95 years old, as our keynote speaker.

I was due to hold a talk on nineteenth century Scottish logician Hugh MacColl, the intended subject of my master’s thesis. Although I was already approaching forty and had quite a lot of experience lecturing at my home university this was to be my first lecture at a big conference and this with around twelve hundred delegates, if my memory serves me correctly, was the biggest conference that the history of science had to offer. I was to say the least somewhat nervous.

Finally the big day dawned and taking my place at the lectern I was introduced by my professor, who was chairing the session, to the seventy or eighty assembled listeners waiting to hear my talk.

 The author apprehensively preparing to present his lecture Munich 7.8.1989

(Photo: Volker Peckhaus)

Suffering from a good portion of stage fright I stumbled out the first sentences of my talk and I was just beginning to come into swing when the door crashed open stopping me in mid sentence and riveting the attention of everybody in the room. One of the organisers stomped through the doorway and marched with determined strides across the room to the desk on the podium where my professor was sitting, his footfalls booming out into the stunned silence like the steps of a jackbooted military officer on his way to an execution in a Hollywood B movie. Reaching the desk he ripped off the conference timetable that was taped to its surface replacing it with a new one, which he taped into place, tearing long strips of adhesive tape from a roll with a noise that seemed to rent the very air in the room. He then turned and with the same purposeful stride marched out of the room banging the door shut with a final clap of doom as he exited. During the whole process he uttered not a word.

I was sunk. Whatever faint shreds of confidence I might have had before his appearance were blown away leaving me a gibbering wreck staring at the listeners who of course were no longer paying any attention to me. Somehow I managed to stumbled through my presentation feeling like I was battling through a thick mental fog and mumble some sort of answers to the few polite questions proffered at the end but what should have been the glorious highpoint to my career as a historian of logic at that point of my life had turned into a nightmare.

The Renaissance Mathematicus Roadshow

Next week the Renaissance Mathematicus will be undertaking a mini-tour of Berlin to hold two semi-popular public lectures, in German. Actually it’s the same lecture on the history of the calendar and the calendar reform held twice. On Tuesday I shall be entertaining the good folks at the Urania Berlin e.V. at 17:30 and on Wednesday those at the Wilhelm-Foerster-Sternwarte mit Planetarium am Insulaner Berlin at 20:00.

If you are in Berlin and should you wish to experience The Renaissance Mathematicus in real live Technicolor, living, breathing and even talking then please come along. If you would like to meet up for a chat, coffee or whatever then leave a comment below and I’ll get in touch.

On this day in history!

1186 BCE According to the calculation of the Greek librarian, mathematician and geodesist Eratosthenes this was the day the Greeks turned Troy into a big bonfire. I wonder if they roasted any marshmallows on the flames?

1292 CE The man who invented everything dies. Roger Bacon Franciscan friar and mediaeval scholar who has been wrongly credited with the invention of everything from the submarine to the umbrella supposedly died on this day. The date of death is probably as mythical as the inventions

1644 CE Evangelista Torricelli discovers nothing! On this date Torricelli described for the first time, in a letter, his invention the Torricellian tube better known as the barometer. This instrument led to the confirmation of existence of the void or vacuum thus dismantling part of the Aristotelian physics. He was actually trying to answer the question as to why simple pumps were limited in the height to which they could pump water, an important question for the then expanding mining industry.

1723 CE Johann Georg Palitzsch was born.

1829 CE Newton was born! No not that one but the zoologist and great auk fan Alfred Newton one of the first leading zoologists to support Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Not many days after my return home there reached me the part of the Journal of the Linnean Society which bears on its cover the date 20th August 1858, and contains the papers by Mr Darwin and Mr Wallace, which were communicated to that Society at its special meeting of the first of July preceding… I sat up late that night to read it; and never shall I forget the impression it made upon me. Herein was contained a perfectly simple solution of all the difficulties which had been troubling me for months past… I am free to confess that in my joy I did not then perceive that… dozens of other difficulties lay in the path… but I was convinced a vera causa [true cause] had been found… and I never doubted for one moment, then nor since, that we had one of the grandest discoveries of the age—a discovery all the more grand because it was so simple.

1910 CE Jacque-Yves Cousteau was born and if you need me to tell you who he was you’re a hopeless case.

2009 CE The Renaissance Mathematicus plunged for the first time into the vast unknown void of cyberspace! The proprietors report that the baby blog has developed into a strapping two year old and is planning on staying around for a good while yet.

Ich bin ein Gastblogger

Following Pepsi-Gate a group of Science Blogs refugees got together with other like-minded science bloggers and founded an island of science blogging excellence in hyperspace at Scientopia. For reasons that are beyond my, admittedly, limited comprehension they decided that they needed to lower the tone of their establishment and invited me to contribute as a guest blogger. Always one to create a disturbance or to be a public nuisance I immediately accepted the invitation and so for the next two weeks I shall be guest blogging there.

My first contribution is “The Road to the Renaissance or One Thing Leads to Another”. Others will follow in the next fourteen days and will be linked to from here as they appear. Come join me at Scientopia, take a look around and see how real science blogging is done.

History, morals, ethics, reliability and authority.

This is almost certainly not going to be a very coherent or conclusive post because of the nature of its contents. One of my commentators doubted the truth of Galileo’s belief in astrology and offered up the old lame excuse of historians of science who don’t want their heroes to have feet clay (“no it can’t be true that Newton was an alchemist” or “Kepler only believed in astrology when he was young and naïve but he abandoned it as a mature scientist”) saying that he only did it for the money. As Ms Dr. Higgitts Higgitt correctly pointed out if that were the case why did he then cast detailed horoscopes for himself and his daughters? The commentator then asked for sources for the claim that Galileo was a practicing astrologer. I duly supplied some and included a paper by the historian of astrology Nick Kollerstrom. The commentator immediately responded with the information that according to Wikipedia Kollerstrom is a Holocaust denier and the question why then should we trust him as an authority on Galileo’s astrology?

 

Now I have to admit that I only knew Kollerstrom as a historian of astrology whose work is accepted by the history of science community and gets quoted by them without reservations. I also know that which I have read of his has hand and foot and appears to be in order. I never ever thought of looking him up on Wikipedia or Google and was not aware of his apparent Holocaust denial. If it is true, and it seems to be, that he is a holocaust denier then he is a scumbag but does his being a Holocaust denier invalidate his work as an astrology historian as my commentator seemed to imply? Even if his work on Galileo’s astrology is valid, which I think it is, should I/we refuse to quote or recommend it on ethical grounds? If he were a car salesperson I certainly wouldn’t buy a car from him. Where should I draw the line? Not to use his work would be difficult as he is co-editor with Nicolas Campion of the collected and annotated English edition of Galileo’s astrological papers, as far as I know the only such edition in any language. The papers mostly in the form of correspondence are not collected together but distributed throughout the official collected works of Galileo.

 

Of course Kollerstrom is not the only academic whose personal beliefs or behaviour in other areas make contact with his work ethically questionable. Where do we draw a line? How should I react? I live just down the road from the city of Nürnberg, The Reichsparteistadt (that is the home-base of the Nazi Party) where the laws depriving the Jews of their civil rights were issued (Die Nürnberger Gesetze) there is much here to keep the memory of the Holocaust very much alive. I detest and despise Holocaust deniers but I can’t answer my own moral questions. Do you have any thoughts, answers, rules of conduct, behaviour for me in this situation?

Having my trumpet blown for me.

In order to set the scene for the following story I need to reveal some details of the private life of the Renaissance Mathematicus. My radio alarm clock goes off shortly before seven o’clock and after having listened to the news I get up, get dressed and go out into the woods with the other half of the RM team, Sascha. When we get home I clean my teeth, make my tea, Darjeeling First Flush drunk black without sugar if you’re asking, and sit down at the computer, Apple naturally, for my first journey through the intertubes accompanied by the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4. I have a set ritual of the order in which I visit various blogs, Wikipedia and my mailbox. On opening my mailbox I am usually confronted by a selection of messages from the history of astronomy mailing list (HASTRO-L), the Mersenne digest from the history of science mailing list, messages from the university library, private mails and spam.

 

A few days ago I had a mail from a sweetly named young lady informing me that the Renaissance Mathematicus had been selected for a list of the best fifty history of science blog sites, however on clicking on the link I discovered that the friendly siren was a spammer hustling for links to her website selling rotating bathtubs with built in rocket launchers or something like that.

 

This morning as I opened my mailbox, whilst sipping the life giving juices of my second mug of tea, I was confronted by a handful of mails from HASTRO-L on Columbus and the Ephemerides of Regiomontanus a debate in which I am one of the principle participants, an announcement from Mersenne of a conference in Gdansk in September on the 400^th anniversary of Hevelius’ birth that I am seriously thinking of attending and a mail from the university library telling me that a book I had ordered through inter-library loan had arrived and was waiting to be collected. In the middle of all this was a mail from a guy I had never heard of with “Congratulations” as header. Spam was my first reaction and I almost consigned it to the trashcan without opening it, however curiosity got the better of me.

 

The mail informed me that I had won the Cliopatria award for the best individual history blog for 2010! Definitely spam! But I clicked on the link anyway to see what was on offer this time and nearly fell of my stool as I realised that I had really been honoured with a prestigious award from the History News Network. There’s an English slang expression that has become popular since I left the island that perfectly describes my feelings on finally becoming aware of what I was reading; I was gob smacked! In fact I’m still in a state of advanced shock now, eight hours later. All I can say is that I’m humbled and very, very honoured that anybody should think that my very minor contributions to the world of history in the Internet are worthy of consideration and am deeply thankful to the judges who have chosen to bestow this honour on my blog. But hey you guys what have you been smoking and where can I get some?

 

Of course it’s all really a mistake and tomorrow I will get an email apologising intently for the error as the award should have gone to a blog called “The Regency Mantelpiece” but somebody fucked up and because of the similarity of the names sent it to me by mistake but until then I shall bask in the glory of what might have been.

 

A Christmas Trinity II: Charlie, Ivor, Robert and me.

Charles Babbage, who was born on 26^th December 1791¹, is famous as a pioneer in the history of the computer, a fame that is to some extent exaggerated as his work, although spectacular (his analytical engine was a full von Neumann machine more than a century before von Neumann became famous for defining the same), had no real influence on the later actual development of the computer, the later inventors only becoming aware of Babbage’s work after the fact.

However Babbage is significant in the history of science and technology not only for his calculating engines. He was for a number of years the holder of the Lucasian Chair for mathematics at Cambridge, whose current holder is Michael Green the string theorist and whose previous occupants include Stephan Hawking the cosmologist, the physicists Paul Dirac and Gabriel Stokes, the astronomer and optical physicist George Biddell Airy (a friend of Babbage), its original occupant Isaac Barrow and his successor Isaac Newton. Babbage was also instrumental in the founding of a number of scientific societies most notably the Royal Astronomical Society and the British Society for the Advancement of Science.

As well as working on his calculating engines he worked as a scientific advisor to governments and rulers throughout Europe and distinguished himself as an inventor. One Internet site has the following list of his inventions, “the dynamometer, standard railroad gauge, uniform postal rates, occulting lights for lighthouses, Greenwich time signals, heliograph ophthalmoscope. He also had an interest in cyphers and lock-picking.” For me the most fascinating fact is that he also invented that essential stage prop of Hollywood westerns the cowcatcher! This was actually conceived to push aside small obstacles on the tracks and not cows!

Over the years Babbage has gained a reputation as an English eccentric based largely on his own autobiography Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864) and in particular for the often-quoted chapter XXVI therein Street nuisances, which he even published as a separate pamphlet. Here Babbage complains bitterly about the noise pollution produced by street musicians and street criers, to quote just one such passage:

It is difficult to estimate the misery inflicted upon thousands of persons and the absolute pecuniary penalty imposed upon multitudes of intellectual workers by the loss of their time, destroyed by organ-grinders and other similar nuisances.

He is here complaining the he and others like him are unable to work because of the noise produced by street musicians. Such passages and others like them from this chapter are quoted as evidence that Babbage was at best an eccentric and at worst a loony. I beg to differ.

Another noted British eccentric of more recent vintage was the Scottish poet, musician, storyteller and educationalist Ivor Cutler whose quirky humour and fascinating ditties enriched my childhood and my youth. I still own and love his wonderful LP Ludo. Cutler was much loved by John Peel and played a role in the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour film. He is said to be probably the only artist to have loyal audiences on BBC Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4. Cutler was notorious for his many eccentricities and in particular for his passionate support of the Noise Abatement Society. He would ask to see the manager in cafes and bars with background music and complain that the sound was hurting his sensitive ears. He always won and got the offending sound system turned off. In supermarkets with music systems he would also summon the manager and complain that he was unable to think about what he wished to purchase because of the intruding noise of the background music.

Robert Fripp legendary guitarist of King Crimson is another Englishman who has been labelled an eccentric. A man whose scorching lead solos have graced no only his own music but also such classics as Bowie’s Heroes or the new Grinderman single defies the etiquette for rock lead guitarists and plays sitting down. In a business whose public image in defined by the catchphrase “sex and drugs and rock and roll” Fripp is an abstinent intellectual who read the Financial Times and pontificates on the morals of the music business. Fripp writes a very entertaining Internet road diary and here he comments sarcastically on the Noise Pollution Units (music systems) at the breakfast troughs in the hotels where he stays whilst underway. He has taken to carrying his so-called noisebusters, an ipod loaded with suitable classical music of his own choosing.

I too have a local reputation as an English eccentric, an aging English hippie living in Franconia who is accompanied everywhere by a large shaggy mongrel dog. I too like my fellow British eccentrics intensely dislike being barraged by other people’s choice of music in bars, cafes, restaurants, shops, on the streets and even today in medical practices. I love music and even call myself a music junkie. I spent a large part of my life earning my living as a concert promoter, concert manager and live concert sound technician. I have an obscenely large record collection (an expression that dates me especially considering the fact that the majority of the music I own is now actually on CD). My favourite occupation is listening to music both live and recorded but I want to listen to the music of my choice in a space conceived for intensive listening. I do not want to be forced to listen to somebody else’s choice of music when I’m drinking a coffee, buying my groceries, having dental surgery (I once got very dirty looks in a dental clinic when I requested that they turn off the aural pollution) or just simply strolling down the street.

Today, Green politicians are very active about environmental pollution and astronomers about light pollution I think more people should take an active stand with Charlie, Ivor Robert and me on noise pollution!

1) This should have been posted yesterday but real life intervened.

Isaac, William, Eduardo and me!

For all those that don’t know, the picture I posted on Monday is of a statue in the courtyard of the British Library in London and I posted it whilst sitting inside said building. My visit was my first to the British Library since it moved out of the British Museum and having been one of those privileged to have held a readers ticket to the BM reading room, the one where Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital,

I was very curious to see what had been created to replace that historical location.

I was also keen to see the statue in real life, I had already seen pictures, because it has very special personal connotations for me, which I will now explain.

The statue is a three dimensional realisation of William Blake’s print of Isaac Newton created by the Italo-Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi.

I discovered the poems of William Blake when I was sixteen years old and fell in love with them, their author and his prints and drawings. Blake’s view of the world perfectly encapsulates one aspect of my own personality and he will always remain my favourite poet. In the same period of my life I became fascinated by Isaac Newton the (co-)creator of the calculus that was my favourite occupation at the time. This fascination eventually led by a round about route to my becoming a historian of mathematics and to this blog. After many years of reading and studying him I think that Isaac was probably an arsehole but I still find him fascinating. Blake’s print combines my two contradictory (and believe you me you don’t get much more contradictory than Blake and Newton) teenage heroes and I have had a framed copy of it hanging on my wall for years.

This brings us to Paolozzi’s bronze three-dimensional rendition of Blake.  Given my attachment to the original I would find the statue interesting whoever had created it but its being from Eduardo makes it very personal. What now follows is not name-dropping but just a piece of personal history.

When I was a child Eduardo was one of my friends, a very special friend. Eduardo lived in a small hamlet on the Essex marshes that was formally part of the village where my parents lived although actually about two miles away. I learnt to swim a couple of hundred yards from Eduardo’s cottage and when my mother had to go into hospital as I was ten years old my sister and I lived with Eduardo and his wife Frieda for three weeks. Eduardo, a great bear of a man, was like a big kid and during those three weeks the two of us played with his collection of toy robots, flew his RAF weather kite and generally had a great time; those three weeks remain one of my favourite childhood memories. Later in my teens I went to the local grammar school travelling the fifteen miles by train and riding the one and a half miles to the local railway station on my bike. Once a week Eduardo would take the same train to London and we used to race the stretch from the village to the station.

I didn’t realise till much later in life how important/famous/significant Eduardo was as an artist. For me he was just a very special friend and on Monday I made a small pilgrimage to the British Library to see my friends version of my favourite artistic image; I wasn’t disappointed.

Flying Visit

I shall be making a flying visit to the old country next weekend for a gathering of the clan. I shall be in London for the day on Monday 2^nd August should any reader of this blog be interested in meeting me for a cup of tea and a chocolate digestive. I shall also be in Thorpe-le-Soken on Saturday 31^st July but I suspect that there might be a dearth of Renaissance Mathematicus fans in this God forsaken corner of North East Essex. Whatever, should you be interested in a get together then leave a message in the comments.

A death in the community

I’m a very minor part of the German history of astronomy community one of whose leading lights was the Augsburger amateur (in the best sense) historian Inge Keil who established her reputation with her volume on the life and work of the Augsburger telescope maker Johann Wiesel, Augustanus Opticus: Johann Wiesel (1583 – 1662) und 200 Jahre optisches Handwerk in Augsburg, the first of many books and papers that have become standard works in the history of optics. Johann Wiesel was the leading European telescope maker in the middle of the 17^th century and the first to construct and sell telescopes with multiple lens eyepieces.

I had the privilege, the honour and the pleasure of having know Frau Keil an excellent scholar and a first class historian who was also a warm, friendly and generous human being and of having had many stimulating discussions with her about 17^th century optics a subject on which she was a font of wisdom. She scolded me for not finishing the written versions of lectures that I held at conferences that we both attended, as she said that I was withholding important results from the world of historical research to which we both belonged. Her publications were always punctual and meticulous.

Frau Keil died on the evening of the 21^st July shortly after her 81^st birthday, a sad loss for the history of science community and not just in Germany.