Comments on conference proposal - Bruno and Tycho

My course supervisor and P of S / dissertation tutor, Miklos emailed me with respect to a draft of my proposed Conference pitch that I sent him on Friday. He is very critical of the draft, but mainly due to me not having really made clear that I actually have something interesting to say!But he does think that the idea of comparing Bruno and Tycho in response to Copernicanism might be a good topic. So should focus on this, this being just a part of the proposal I sent him. I have located some examples of the conference abstracts that were produced for the last conference on this subject last year - so at least I now have a better idea about the rhetorical style involved.

So I have been preparing a bibliography from the sources I have on Tycho and Bruno and I can see the outline of some sort of idea here. But do I have enough time to turn it into a proposal by end of next weekend? This could be quite tight. I have various papers and books to review as a first step - for instance, papers by McMullin on Bruno and Copernicus, and Blair on Tycho's criticism of Copernicus. After this, maybe I will have a better idea of whether I have enough time. But it will still have the same theme of showing how difficult a rational reconstruction of the History of Science is

This does highlight an interesting question - what now is my goal on the MSc? Maybe it is to test whether I could do a PhD? Therefore I should be even less concerned with the day-to-day course work and more concerned with creating a knowledge of the literature in areas that interest me and developing writing methodologies. This is quite a challenging new idea about my course and will require a lot of thought

What I would ideally like to do is produce a really good book on Kepler. Perhaps based on the recent book by Rowland on Bruno or the Lattis book on Clavius. Scholarly, maybe 450 pages inc footnotes. There are so many articles on Kepler that I could try to use by blending together. Once or twice I have thought that I am a much better expositional writer than a writer of original material - but perhaps everyone thinks that as they start an MSc. Maybe originality comes later?

Or perhaps the time is now ripe for an update of Kuhn's Copernican Revolution. I am working on the idea of a piece about Kuhn's book for the H of S seminar, but this is a very complex theme for me to deal with. Nonetheless, a good piece on Kuhn's book would enable me to assess better whether a new book on this subject is possible.

Exciting stuff to think about . . . .