The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture

摘要

This volume of twelve essays (plus introduction) aims to be a "first attempt at surveying the observatory's multiple roles in nineteenth-century scien-tific, economic, and cultural life." (p. 2). Historians of technology will find many of these essays a rich resource for their field: the book's contributors emphasize "the observatory's material culture . . . the telescopes, polar-iscopes, spectroscopes, magnetometers, clocks, and thermometers" and their role in establishing astronomy as the "first precision science" (p. 9). The emphasis on precision measurement within the nineteenth-century observatory made astronomy the cultural model of scientific exactness; as a result, controlling the observatory, its instruments, and its data became a political necessity.