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Introduction

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Summary

This characteristic of modern experiments – that they consist principally of measurements – is so prominent, that the opinion seems to have got abroad that, in a few years, all the great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will then be left to men of science will be to carry on these measurements to another place of decimals …

James Clerk Maxwell (1871)

Each observer went out ticketed with his ‘personal equation’, his senses drilled into a species of martial discipline, his powers absorbed, so far as possible, in the action of a cosmopolitan observing machine.

Agnes Clerke (1902)

The astronomers who are to-day to make their observations have all gone through the preliminary process of what is technically known as correcting their personal equation … What a gain to political life in practice it would be if we could only correct the personal equation of those who think, write, speak, and act in the sphere of politics! Suppose, among our members of Parliament, we could exactly measure and allow for the inordinate vanity of one, the litigious querulousness of another, the professional bias of a third, the hereditary, national or sectarian prejudices of a fourth …

Sydney Morning Herald, 9 December 1874

On 9 December 1874, in Sydney, New South Wales, a rare transit of Venus happened to coincide with a round of important local elections. In the Sydney Morning Herald for that day, set among articles about ship arrivals, a smoking volcano in the Torres Strait and commodities quotations from Singapore (nutmeg, mace, pepper, pearl sago, tapioca, rice, coffee, cigars, etc.), there is an article entitled ‘Science and Politics’. The article sets out to contrast these two ‘very different phases of human action’. On that morning, at the observatory on Flagstaff Hill, astronomers were straining to time with the utmost precision the passage of the silhouette of Venus as it crawled across the surface of the sun. Sydney was just one of hundreds of spots on the globe where similar observations were being made on that day.

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Publisher: Pickering & Chatto
First published in: 2014

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