Séminaire général

Nous aurons le plaisir d'écouter : Lorraine Daston (Institut Max Planck Berlin) 

Titre : “The Birth of a Scientific Object: Describing the Aurora Borealis in Early Modern Europe”

Résumé :
Dragons, chasms, spears, cupolas, organ pipes, horses, waves, crowns, armies battling in the sky – these are only a few of the analogies early modern observers reached for in their efforts to describe what Galileo had in 1619 christened as “aurora borealis” – “dawn of the north”. But were they all talking about the same thing? To this day, historians, meteorologists, and physicists can’t be sure. Auroras are rare, evanescent, and protean. Its colors range from luminous white, to blood red, to green, to deep violet; their forms shift at lightning speed; where and when one will appear is still a matter of informed guesswork. The challenge of creating a standardized vocabulary of description that would permit observers in scattered locales in the northern hemisphere, from natural philosophers in London to Jesuits in China, to pool their information is only an extreme example of how European encounters with novelties of all kinds during the early modern period stretched description to the limit.