As an academic research project we are, of course, interested in making an impact – through museum displays and public programmes, through this blog and other forms of media. It was, therefore, particularly heartening to catch, as it were, one moment of impact almost as it took place.
Thony Christie, author of the Renaissance Mathematicus blog and regular commenter here, flagged up a post on the Science Blogs blog Uncertain Principles, by Chad Orzel, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College in Schenectady, NY. He had put up a post asking how to pronounce ‘Maskelyne’, as he was about to teach a class on the history of timekeeping using Sobel’s Longitude as a text. Thony and I both commented there, highlighting the rather different story we have been touching on in this blog, but thanks for what happened next goes mainly to Thony as my comment got lost in moderation for some time!
A couple of days later, Chad had taken his class and reported back in another post:
This week was all about Dava Sobel’s Longitude, and the making of seaworthy chronometers. I said half-jokingly that the week followed a sort of a course through Union’s curriculum: Monday was on the science of navigation, using the experimental results presented here; Wednesday was about the engineering of clocks, specifically John Harrison’s innovations for his marine clocks; and today was the humanities side of things, presenting the story of Harrison’s attempts to get paid. Those last slides are really sketchy because I spent most of the class having them provide details of the Harrisons’ grievances against the Board of Longitude, as related by Sobel. I then provided a bit of the other side of the story, from the Board of Longitude blog: (Rehabilitating Nevil Maskelyne, Part One: Reassessing the accusations, Part Two: Why lunar distance?, Part Three: Cultural differences, Part Four: The Harrisons’ accusations, and conclusions) and this law review article (PDF) looking at the case in a more balanced way than Sobel’s book.
I’ve been saying repeatedly that this class is about learning how to make arguments, and so introduced the additional material by asking them if they could find holes in Sobel’s argument. They did a pretty good job of picking up on places where she glosses over inconvenient details, so I think it was a useful class.
Good news! And well done to Alexi for her setting-the-record straight series. As Chad commented on the earlier post, “The Board of Longitude blog is a very nice and compact counterpoint” to the suspiciously tidy story told by Sobel.
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