Back to work

I have finally to get back to work after seveeral days when I haven't motivated and have done virtually nothing. Some part of this is due, no doubt, to Linda having clients coming to the house again - this gives me some relatively uninterrupted periods of the day when I can work properly.

One interesting project that I enjoyed working on today was a review of old issues of the journal Archive of History of Exact Science - in particular, I worked through most of the years that I don't have access to via the LSE online system. Quite a few of these articles could be good to find - they have the full journal at the Radcliffe Science Library, so I could see the articles there.

I have finished reading Methuen's article on Maestlin. Over the last few days I have sold £120 of cds and have used £60 of this to buy Methuen's Kepler's Tubingen - the most money I have ever paid for a book. I am not intending to spend much on books this year - I had quite a splurge before Christmas. But I am planning to try and sell around 1,000 cds, which at £4-5 each would generate me quite a substantial future book fund. But actually, there are very few books I want - my Amazon wish list only have about £200 of books on it at the moment, which for me is quite low.

One article that I have studied in some detail today is Pyenson's What is the Good of history of Science? This is a detailed review of three founders of the study of the history of science - Osler, Sarton and Weber - and contains lots of interesting stuff about the development of the subject over the last 100 years. But it is also a somewhat odd article, rejecting any role for P of S in H of S, and then rather petering out towards the end.

This did prompt me to have a look at some very old issues of Isis via the LSE link. These go all the way back to the first issue in 1913. It is amazing just how much of the magazine was written by Sarton! Some interesting book reviews, where most of the books are available at the Bodleian - these could be an interesting source for neglected works.

Also on today's reading was an article by Hanson from 1962, The Irrelevance of History of Science to Philosophy of Science. This had been used by Pyenson to justify his non-consideration of P of S. However this appears to me to be an outrageous mis-reading of Hanson, who is mainly concerned with strict logical relevance in a logical empiricist framework - for which the irrelevance is not saying there is no connection. Interesting, Hanson makes a number of points that Feyerabend subsequently makes about the need for P of S to engage with what science actually is.

New series on BBC tonight, Science and Islam, which I am very keen to see. I wonder if there will be a book to accompany this.

And a cold and clear night enabling me to take some more photos of Orion, now I have found the missing camera tripod. A big improvement on last time, but I would not imagine they make the best blog pictures. I was quite pleased with them though.

The bottom half of Orion - 10sec at 150mm. Rigel at the bottom right and the faint red glow of the famous Orion nebula is just visible.

My next plan to to take multiple shots and process them up into stacked pictures - still not very clear how that is done though.