Barometers, dip compasses, pressed flowers, dead birds: Alexander von Humboldt and multidisciplinarity

The name Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) first crossed my eyes as a pre-teen, when, after pestering my mother for something good to read, she gave me The Kon Tiki Expedition. I was instantly hooked and read it over and over again as a teenager. Thor Heyerdahl's daring 1947 expedition to South America on a balsa wood raft relied on the Humboldt Current to carry them part of the way. Thus I learned of the existence of this legendary scientist and humanist.

There seems to be a lot of Humboldt around at the moment, and I'm currently reading a round table critique of a 2009 book about him, The Passage to Cosmos, by Laura Dassow Walls.  

Humboldt had what seems to be a rather modern view of the planet Earth, which prefigured the vision of the International Geophysical Year. He saw grand global processes and the connectedness which created a unitary Earth; this was reflected in his final (unfinished) five volume work entitled simply Cosmos.

He was so famous in his time that the state of US state of Nevada was almost named after him! This is how round table contributor Felipe Fernández-Armesto describes him:

He had started his scientific career like an encyclopaedist of the Middle Ages, gathering the learning of the world. He became the last magus of the Renaissance, attempting the blasphemy of comprehending the cosmos.

Michael F. Robinson notes his collecting obsessions: Barometers, dip compasses, pressed flowers, dead birds: they fill the Baron’s world. This is the kind of list which appeals to my archaeologist's heart through the contrast of artefacts hard, soft, dead, half-alive and never alive: equal weight given to the cold scientific instrument and the petals of an ephemeral flower.

Part of what resonates in this round table is the discussion of how Humboldt defied divisions between science and humanities, which were not as hard and fast then as they are now. I have been pondering this lately because, as a space archaeologist, I make it my business to read the relevant literature in the space science and engineering journals. I need to in order to pursue my research; it's as simple as that.

I notice, however, that this is often a one-way flow. Numerous of my colleagues in the space world will happily write and publish on themes of history, social sciences and environmental sciences without referring to the research carried out by scholars in those fields. Hence a lot of it reads as rather naive with undergraduate assumptions about human behaviour and the nature of scientific enquiry. They get away with it because their peer reviewers are equally unaware of scholarship outside their own fields. So it's nice to contemplate a great thinker who would have had none of these silos - even if he inadvertently helped create them.

Walls argues that Humboldt invented 

a way of speaking, about nature that we now call ‘environmental’: namely, a planetary interactive causal network operating across multiple scale levels, temporal and spatial, individual to social to natural, scientific to aesthetic to spiritual (2009:11).

Human impacts - clearing vegetation, altering water flows through irrigation - were also part of Humboldt's conceptualisation of the world: very Anthropocene, we would now say. 

The message of Walls' book is that the divisions between science and the humanities no longer serve the world well. As someone trying to bridge these divisions myself, I cannot but agree.

Reference

H-Environment Roundtable Reviews Volume 2 No. 4 (2012) www.h-net.org/~environ/roundtables Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 

International Year of the Quiet Sun, 1964-1965

I do love a good International Scientific Year, and I was born in this one, so it seems a bit special.

The IGY was aimed at taking advantage of a solar maximum; the IQSY (International Quiet Sun Year) was all about the solar minimum. There were some satellite missions launched specifically for it, but I'll need to do a bit more research to find out which ones.

An interesting article about planning the IQSY can be found here:

Martin A. Pomerantz 1963 International Years of the Quiet Sun, 1964-65 Science 142(3596):1136-1143

The International Quiet Sun Year is a lovely notion as it implies that the Sun is usually noisy - like it was singing to us. (I'm sure someone must have translated solar activity into music before).

Launch of International Astronomy Year 2009

15 January 2009

2009 has been declared the International Year of Astronomy by the UN General Assembly in collaboration with the International Astronomical Union.

Launched under the theme, 'The Universe - Yours to discover', IYA2009 involves more than one hundred countries, and will stimulate worldwide interest, especially among young people, in astronomy and science.

The official opening ceremony takes place in Paris, 15-16 January 2009, under the aegis of the United Nations (UN), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Nobel Prize winners, scientists from all over the world and government ministers are attending this prestigious event.

Don't disrespect Vanguard 1

Last night I watched Space Race, the series created by Deborah Cadbury. This episode was all about Sputnik 1 and Explorer 1, and their creators, von Braun and Korolev. Naturally, as a fan of Vanguard, I was disappointed at how the Naval Research Laboratory's satellite was treated in the documentary. There was no mention of the International Geophysical Year, or coherent explanation of the rationale behind preferring a non-military launch vehicle. The documentary maintained that James van Allen was called in at the last minute to build instrumentation for Explorer's experiments. The reality is that van Allen designed his experiment for Vanguard, but cunningly made it compatible with both satellites; when it became clear that Vanguard was under a cloud he transferred to Explorer. When Vanguard 1 was launched, it flew without its experiment packages.

Nonetheless, Vanguard 1 is still up there, and Explorer 1 re-entered in less than a month. Green and Lomask, historians of Vanguard, point out that its technologies are the basis of the USA space industry today.

Go Vanguard!

Ice Station Zebra and the poetry of Michael Dransfield

Yesterday I picked up a second-hand copy of Ice Station Zebra by Alistair Maclean, with a beautiful dustjacket of the nuclear submarine Dolphin under the green Arctic ice. My earlier speculation that the eponymous Ice Station may have been established in during one of the International Polar Years (1883 and 1931) was wrong. It is a new one. Reading it at the moment, eyes peeled for good Cold War quotes.

There is more on the literary front too. Last year I attended a mini-conference at Deakin University, Melbourne, on Landscapes and Memory. One of the presenters quoted a poem by Michael Dransfield (legendary Australian poet who very properly died of drug overdose at age 25) about the Australian landscape. As I listened, I realised with a shock that the landscape which he described was Woomera. The poem evoked red sand tracks, mushroom clouds, open desert. On Friday I decided I needed to track this poem down and went into the Special Collections room at UWA library and read my way through every single bloody Michael Dransfield book they had. To my great frustration I could not find the poem I remembered. Unless it was published in another collection, or even unpublished. By strange coincidence, the partner of Alicia, the Special Collections desk person, is a Dransfield expert. She promised to ask him for me. I did find another top space poem though, so my afternoon was by no means wasted.

More on Moonwatch

In the National Archives today. I discovered that there were Moonwatch groups in Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, and Townsville as well as Woomera, all devoted to optically tracking US spacecraft. The Australian operation was coordinated by Professor Elford at the University of Adelaide and the the information sent in code to the Smithsonian in Washington DC by the Weapons Research Establishment in Salisbury just outside Adelaide.

Even though Moonwatch was set up in the IGY specifically for Vanguard, it proved so successful that the program was continued into the 60s. The main subject of the file in the National Archives was the trouble the Woomera Moonwatch group had with customs when the US sent them a crate of binoculars.

Gibber Gabber

Back from Woomera, utterly exhausted. The weather was glorious but I spent much of my time inside, at the Heritage Centre and the library, researching old newspaper clippings and the Woomera newsletter Gibber Gabber. And what a rich mine it turned out to be! I traced the activities of the Natural History Society, who collected artefacts and went looking for rock art sites, and of the Moonwatch group, formed to track Vanguard 1 optically in 1957. There were many notices about Moonwatch meetings but the Gibber Gabber was strangely silent on the event of Sputnik 1's launch. Later, however, the Moonwatchers were happy to report sightings of Sputnik 3. (The moon referred to was the artificial satellite). The idea of having volunteers undertake tracking was promoted by Fred Whipple of the US IGY Committee.

As well hard work, some happy hours were spent in the ELDO bar ....

Purity of essence

Dr Strangelove is playing on one of the cable channels this morning. General Ripper and his obsession with precious bodily fluids brings to mind Klaus Theweleit's outstanding study of the Freikorps diaries prior to WW II. These young soldiers were similarly obsessed with the idea of contagion and contamination by Jews, women, the masses. In later times, the Western bloc would often use metaphors of contagion for communist ideology.

I've been reading a lot about the International Polar Years in the last couple of weeks. Frankenstein's monster ran away to the North Pole when experiencing an understandable existential crisis. Unfortunately it's a little too early to be related to the 1888 Polar Year. But I'm still thinking about the Ice Station Zebra connections.

Ice Station Zebra

It's SO Cold War. I hadn't seen this film for years and I'd forgotten how dramatic it is - Ernest Borgnine as the Russian double agent, Patrick McGoohan as the cool, cool British spy, Rock Hudson as the hunky all-American submarine captain. There's sabotage, confrontation, and a million Cold War metaphors out on the ice bergs. The film opens with a satellite initiating a burn to bring it into the atmosphere, where it falls with its precious cargo of high-resolution film showing both US and USSR military installations. (I won't spoil the end if you feel inclined to go out and get it).

The North Pole is a good place to develop Cold War metaphors, of course, but it made me think of other things too. The International Geophysical Year of 1957-58, when the superpowers engaged in a race to be first in orbit, was a follow-up to the International Polar Year. I can't remember the exact date but it was 1920s or 1880s. So it's quite likely that the eponymous Ice Station Zebra, a British polar weather station, was established as part of that international cooperative research effort.

When Sputnik 1 was launched, by necessity it overpassed foreign airspace - or post-atmosphere space - I'm sure there's a correct legal term - and established by fiat a convention whereby orbits are not held to violate international conventions on sovereignty. Aeroplane intrusions in foreign airspace were a matter of conflict long after satellites on both sides were performing surveillance with immunity.

Ice Station Zebra rocks! (And you gotta love an opportunity to use the word 'eponymous' .....).