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Speaker: Lorraine Daston (I Tatti / Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin)
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. Radically new flora and fauna, weather, topographies, and peoples in the Far West and the Far East, as well as the creation of new phenomena through experimentation and the invention of new instruments such as the barometer, telescope, and microscope, and even the more systematic observation of phenomena known since antiquity but rarely spotted, such as aurora borealis, demanded an equally new -- yet shared --vocabulary of description
Lorraine Daston is Director emerita at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She has published broadly on topics in the history of science, including probability, wonders, objectivity, and observation. Her most recent books are Rules: A short History of What We Live By (Princeton University Press, 2022) and Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate (Columbia Global Reports, 2023).
Image: Aurora borealis seen over the city of Augsburg in 1582.
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