Luís Miguel Carolino

The eclipse, the astronomer and his audience: Frederico Oom and the total solar eclipse of 28 May 1900 in Portugal

Summary This study offers a detailed analysis of an episode of the popularization of astronomy which took place in Portugal, a peripheral country of Europe, and occurring in the early twentieth century. The episode was driven by the 28 May 1900 total solar eclipse which was seen on the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal and Spain). Instead of focusing on one of the ends of the popularization process, we analyze the circulation of knowledge among scientists and the public, contrast the aims of the various expeditions, professional and amateur, which took place on Portuguese soil, analyze their repercussions in the Portuguese astronomical landscape, and the different ways used by the Portuguese political elite and astronomical community to successfully appropriate this astronomical event to serve their varied agendas, political, social and scientific. In this episode of public enthusiasm for science, a central figure emerged in the network of the official commission, professional and amateur communities and the ‘general public’: Frederico Tomás Oom (1864–1930), an astronomer of the Lisbon Astronomical Observatory. This paper aims to illustrate the different layers of the circulation process, and at proving that the popularization of science was not a unidirectional process from scientists to lay people nor did it serve only a particular agenda, be it political, social or scientific.

The Making of an Academic Tradition: The Foundation of the Lisbon Polytechnic School and the Development of Higher Technical Education in Portugal (1779-1837).

This article offers a comparative analysis of the educational model implemented at the Lisbon Polytechnic School, an institution created in 1837, after the Portuguese Liberal Revolution (1820), and those developed at the higher military academies of the eighteenth century. It argues that, despite serving a substantially different political regime, the creation of the nineteenth-century Portuguese polytechnic system depended extensively upon a tradition of military higher technical education originated in the late ancient regime. In effect, a detailed analysis of the educational aims of the Lisbon Polytechnic, its curricular structure, reference knowledge system and pedagogical methods, demonstrates that the Lisbon Polytechnic pedagogical model was clearly inspired by earlier military technical training institutions such as the Royal Navy Academy and, particularly, the Royal Military Academy of Rio de Janeiro, in the Portuguese colony of Brazil.

The Making of a Tychonic Cosmology: Cristoforo Borri and the Development of Tycho Brahe's Astronomical System

Seventeenth-century Jesuit astronomers are generally acknowledged to have been committed defenders of the cosmology of Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), the year 1620 being seen as the time when Jesuits began openly to do so. That year saw the publication of the Sphaera mundi of Giuseppe Biancani (1566–1625), the first printed defence of the Tychonic world system within the Jesuit milieu. As Biancani’s book had been subjected to a painstaking censorship within the Order, its publication implied the official acceptance of Tycho by the Jesuit hierarchy, and this gave an impetus to Jesuit astronomers and cosmologists to proceed with a Tychonic solution and to examine its related cosmological issues, such as the fluidity of the heavens. Indeed, as Michel-Pierre Lerner has put it, “entre 1620, date de la Sphaera de Biancani, et 1651, quand paraît l’Almagestum novum de Riccioli, l’hypothèse de Brahe a acquis droit de cité: Riccioli écrit que la majorité des jésuites ont choisi ce système dans leurs traités De caelo”. Two reasons have been invoked in order to explain such a preference for Tychonic cosmology. On the one hand, Galileo’s astronomical observations of the early 1610s had put philosophers and mathematicians under pressure to produce radical changes in the traditional system of Ptolemy’s astronomy. On the other hand, religious constraints following the 1616 condemnation of Copernicanism turned Jesuit astronomers away from a heliocentric cosmology, toward which some of their mathematicians — such as Christoph Grienberger — seemed already to have shown some sympathy. From this perspective, Jesuit adherence to Tychonic cosmology has emerged, in the history of astronomy, essentially as a conservative attitude toward new astronomy, a kind of “acceptable compromise” between geocentrism and heliocentrism. This historiographical viewpoint seems largely beyond question for the post-1620 period. Nevertheless, it tends to disregard the distinctiveness of the earlier approaches to Tychonic cosmology by Jesuit astronomers. There is evidence that in the period prior to the condemnation of heliocentrism, a small number of Jesuit astronomers decided in favour of the Tychonic or semi-Tychonic cosmological system on the basis of what they regarded as the intrinsic astronomical value of the geo-heliocentric model. Certainly, religious motives played a role in that decision, but the accuracy of Tycho’s model appeared, for these astronomers, as if it was intrinsically able to comprehend the cosmos and explain all the celestial phenomena. This being the case, there is room for an examination of the reception of Tycho’s system by the Jesuits on its own merits. Yet, being a Tychonic astronomer by the beginning of the seventeenth century did JHA, xxxix (2008)

The portuguese astronomer Melo e Simas (1870-1934): republican ideals and popularization of science

This paper analyses a process of co-construction of knowledge and its multiple forms of communication in a country of the European periphery in the early twentieth century. It focuses on Lieutenant Manuel Soares de Melo e Simas, a politically engaged Portuguese astronomer, who moved from amateur to professional during the political transition from the monarchy to the republic. Melo e Simas paralleled his professional career in continuous activity of communicating science to the public in the context of republicanism in a double way, by responding to the agenda of republicanism and by playing an active role in shaping it. He aimed at educating lay audiences in the various ways of astronomy, and he reached out to as many people as possible by exploring a multitude of communication channels, from lectures to articles in newspapers and journals. Voiced often within newly created republican institutions, the praxis and the ideas of Melo e Simas helped to mold the new republican scientific ethos. By going beyond mere emphasis on scientism and positivism, usually taken to be the defining characteristics of the new republican ethos, this paper argues that science and the specificities of its multiple forms of communication were central to the way Melo e Simas shaped the republican ideology. Furthermore, popularization of science was used to legitimize the status of professional scientists at the same time that it helped reinforce their institutional setting, still to be negotiated in the forthcoming decades through a complex process which deserves further historical analysis.