{"id":3045,"date":"2012-11-24T09:09:54","date_gmt":"2012-11-24T09:09:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=3045"},"modified":"2013-05-25T18:25:15","modified_gmt":"2013-05-25T18:25:15","slug":"being-distracted-in-paris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2012\/11\/24\/being-distracted-in-paris\/","title":{"rendered":"Being Distracted in Paris"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s not so long ago that I wrote<\/a> about the lack of opportunity one typically has at conferences to appreciate the interesting places one gets to visit. As a counter to that slightly depressed commentary, I should add that I have specifically had some brilliant trips to Paris over the years, associated with work (as well as other trips such as my honeymoon!) although not, in most cases, actual conferences. Paris is in my view an amazing city; a good size to be able to walk all around – unlike London or New York \u2013 and I have always felt very safe there, although I\u2019m sure there are bits that it might be less wise to visit. For the last few years \u2013 aside from a couple of wonderful trips courtesy of L\u2019Oreal \u2013 ESPCI <\/a>(which is one of the Grandes Ecoles in Paris) has been the excuse for an annual autumnal visit, as I serve on their International Steering Committee (ISC).\u00a0 Previously, in the wake of my last 2 trips to ESPCI, I have talked about the situation for women in Franc<\/a>e and the rather special education that students receive at ESPCI<\/a>, but this time I\u2019d like to remark on the cultural side of my trip.<\/p>\n

Each year, ESPCI not only works the ISC hard, but also ensures we get a bit of \u2018play\u2019 and some excellent meals in famous restaurants and even, one year, on a rather damp Bateau Mouche. These events tend to start late in the day after a hard day\u2019s work and run long into the night, at least by my standards. It makes for lengthy and tiring if rewarding days. In previous years the \u2018play\u2019 component has consisted of trips to a couple of museums and a concert. This year we were treated to a guided tour of the Paris Observatory, where we were shown around personally by James Lequeux<\/a>, described as \u2018astronome \u00e9m\u00e9rite \u00e0 l\u2019Observatoire de Paris<\/em>\u2019 on the web (who also happens to be the father of the ESPCI\u2019s Scientific Director Fran\u00e7ois Lequeux<\/a> and, for any neutron scatterers amongst my readers, the brother-in-law of Henri Benoit<\/a>).<\/p>\n

We got to clamber around on the roof \u2013 with fine views of the Eiffel Tower, the Pantheon and other notable churches extending as far as Sacr\u00e9-Coeur on the distant horizon – and look at the impressively large Brunner refractor telescope housed in its purpose-built dome. The building itself predates the Greenwich Observatory by several years: the Paris Observatory was built in 1667-72 and is the oldest observatory in the world, built during the reign of the Sun King Louis XIV. Greenwich was not founded until 1675. It is an impressive structure with a wide range of interesting objects on display. Many of these are, as one would expect, directly relevant to the development of observational astronomy, but some also relate to terrestrial surveying. Triangulation neatly explained by triangles, for instance, in some early mapping studies, and a coloured map of France based on Cassini III\u2019s measurements (1756) is also on display. In this context it should be noted that four successive generations of the Cassini family acted as the first four Directors of the Observatory: Cassini I<\/a> (Giovanni Domenico) 1671-1712, Cassini II<\/a> (Jacques) 1712-56 , Cassini III<\/a> (de Thury) 1756-84 and Cassini IV<\/a> (Compte de Cassini) 1784-93. These dates refer to the periods when they were Directors, not their lifetimes.<\/p>\n

\"Casssini2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

1810 sculpture of Cassini I (Jean Dominique Cassini) prominently displayed at the Paris Observatory.<\/em><\/p>\n

Not having made a study of the history of astronomy, my knowledge was sketchy and, as I discovered, very Anglo-centric. It\u2019s always good to be reminded that England, or in this case Greenwich, is not necessarily the centre of the universe: the French have their own meridian, a brass line reaching across the \u2018Meridian Chamber\u2019, whose position was first established in 1667 as the observatory was set up. And outside the north-facing window is a fine straight road continuing the line of the meridian for a fair distance. When I asked one of the other (French) members of the party about the meridian, he instantly got out his iPhone to check the web for more information and came back with the fact that the English and French worked out a compromise about the meridian to the effect that the English could \u2018have\u2019 zero longitude but would have to convert to meters. If true, I think devilish British cunning came into play here, as miles are still alive and well in much of our countryside, but I haven\u2019t found this story myself so maybe I was being wound up. In fact it wasn\u2019t till 1884 that the zero meridian was finally determined to be situated at Greenwich, after an international conference (largely swung, as far as I can find out, by the Americans who had already adopted the British rather than French meridian).<\/p>\n

Most of the objects on display were down to one or other of the Cassini’s, with Cassini I\u2019s map of the moon\u2019s surface (including a non-existent heart-shaped feature and a moon maiden: these, we were told, may have been in tribute to his wife), many instruments and the later Cassinis\u2019 work on surveying all on display. But the object which most took my fancy was a copy of Newton\u2019s Principia given to him by Edmond Halley<\/a>, and with a dedication from Halley to Cassini I (you can see this in Figure 1 here<\/a> but we got to see the pages open in a display cabinet). What we were told by Lequeux was that this book was presented by Halley to Cassini I in gratitude for Cassini having given Halley the idea that comets might return, shortly before the comet that bears his name was discovered. When I tweeted this fact the next morning, historians of science were less convinced that what I was told was true, with a swift response coming that the idea was actually due to John Flamsteed<\/a>, the first Astronomer Royal who was based at Greenwich; subsequently there was a hint of a retraction of this point of view.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t comment further on this, as a quick search on the web does not substantiate the anecdote. What is well known is that Principia was not a book that made much of an inroad into French thinking until well into the 18th<\/sup> century, when it was translated into French by Emilie du Chatelet<\/a>, who was Voltaire\u2019s mistress and invited Voltaire to come and live with her and her husband in an aristocratic m\u00e9nage-a-trois<\/em>. She is one of those rather invisible women of science from the past who \u2013 like Mary Somerville<\/a>\u00a0 and Ada Lovelace<\/a> \u2013 really came into her own when getting her teeth into a job of translation. Then she could take the original work and weave in more ideas of her own, as described in Patricia Fara<\/a>\u2019s book Pandora\u2019s Breeches.<\/p>\n

The presence of the Principia, and other notes on display nearby associated with the Dutch scientist Christiaan Hugyens<\/a>, served to remind me just how international science was back during the 17th<\/sup> and 18th<\/sup> centuries, something at least briefly impeded later by the French Revolution and its aftermath but not as much deterred as one might have expected by the relative difficulties of travelling at the time. Young gentlemen like Halley were expected to go on a \u2018Grand Tour\u2019, and if he happened to drop in on the Paris Observatory, perhaps stay there for some weeks or months, that was regarded as absolutely fine. Hugyens, meanwhile, was an early FRS despite being based in Paris and The Hague and mainly simply in correspondence with Londoners like Hooke and Newton.<\/p>\n

So, for once, my work-based trip gave me an opportunity to get to grips with some history of science, as well as fulfilling my main role for ESPCI. I got to see some fascinating objects, and learned how uncritical my thinking had been about Greenwich\u2019s central role in our astronomical and nautical past. However, I appreciate by writing this as such a novice in the topics I touch upon, despite having tried to check my facts I am laying myself open to correction on many fronts from the historical perspective. Please take it simply as a homage to some amazing bygone scientists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s not so long ago that I wrote about the lack of opportunity one typically has at conferences to appreciate the interesting places one gets to visit. As a counter to that slightly depressed commentary, I should add that I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[190],"tags":[603,958,602,604],"class_list":["post-3045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-of-science","tag-cassini","tag-espci","tag-paris-observatory","tag-principia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3045\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}