The joy of working hard again!!

It would be fair to say that in May and June my work wasn't really at the highest level of productivity. One reason was that I seem to have had really bad hayfever this year and generally felt lousy alot of the time. Other reasons could include a bout of depression related to work questions going forward. Or it could be that I didn't enjoy having to focus on PH400 once it was clear that I would have to defer PH404. But the last few days have seen something of a bounce back with a decent amout of "proper" work getting done.

I have read the whole of Kragh's Introduction to the Historiography of Science. I had not liked the little bit of this I read some months ago but for some reason I have got far more out of it this time through. This inspired me to tackle one of the more difficult books on Kepler, James Voelkel's The Composition of Kepler's Astronomia Nova, which took me 3 days to complete (including most of a weekend while Linda was away teaching a course)

For less serious reading I have been dipping into Ferguson's Tycho and Kepler and Koestler's The Sleepwalkers. Then there is Owen Chadwick's The Reformation that I rattled through in another couple of days.

Then a trip to Oxford to copy several articles at the Radcliffe Science Library - including Westman's excellent The Comet and the Cosmos: Kepler, Mastlin and the Copernican Hypothesis. from a rare book on Copernicanism from the mid 1970s

So for the first time in ages I feel I am making good progress. In some ways it has felt like the week in Italy last August with which I began this Blog. A steady flow of material covered and a growing sense again of it all fitting together. Long may this continue