The group of mathematicians known as Bourbaki persuasively proclaimed the isolation of its field of research – pure mathematics – from society and science. It may therefore seem paradoxical that links with larger French cultural movements, especially structuralism and potential literature, are easy to establish. Rather than arguing that the latter were a consequence of the former, which they were not, I show that all of these cultural movements, including the Bourbakist endeavor, emerged together, each strengthening the public appeal of (...) the others through constant, albeit often superficial, interaction. This codependency is partly responsible for their success and moreover accounts for their simultaneous fall from favor, which, however, can clearly be seen as also stemming from different internal problems. To understand this dynamics, I argue that Bourbaki’s role can best be captured by using the notion of cultural connector, which I introduce here. (shrink)

“Today I made the ascent of the highest mountain in this region, which for good reasons is called Ventosum, guided only by the desire to see the extraordinary altitude of the place”. Petrarch's ascent of the Mont Ventoux in 1336, or rather his account of it, established the mountain as a distinctive place for experiencing and understanding nature and self. Since then, the mountain has been sought out in increasing numbers by those pursuing spiritual elevation, bodily exertion, and/or scientific investigation. (...) To this day, a pilgrimage church, several hotels, and an observatory are characteristically perched atop Mont Ventoux. And it is famous among cyclists as a legendarily difficultétapeof the Tour de France. (shrink)

This article maps out the lexical landscape of precision from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth century and investigate the various meanings of precision, both as a word and a concept, within the Paris Observatory and beyond. It argues that precision was first an attribute of instruments supposed to produce numerical measurements, like clocks and divided circles or sectors attached to optical devices. Less often, precision was applied to observers, the handling of instruments, and observational methods, including mathematical corrections (...) applied to raw data. When all these aspects were combined the numerical result finally was also deemed to be precise. Moving to the debate about the shape of the Earth that shook the Academy of Sciences in the 1730s, it follows the way in which wider audiences were conveyed the various meanings of precision. Between the Cartesian resistance to the emergence of a professional science of precision and the pedagogical approach followed by the Newtonians such as Maupertuis, it argues that Cassini III embraced the professionalism of modern science, but did not feel that methodological precision was out of the reach of an educated public. While Maupertuis has seemed content with a discussion focusing on the precision of instruments and results, Cassini III set himself the hefty task of producing an accessible account of precision as a method of inquiry. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the way in which French artillery engineers met the challenge of air drag in the nineteenth century. This problem was especially acute following the development of rifled barrels, when projectile initial velocities reached values much higher than the speed of sound in air. In these circumstances, the Newtonian approximation according to which the drag was a force proportional to the square of the velocity was not nearly good enough to account for experimental results. This prompted (...) a series of theoretical and experimental investigations aimed at determining the correct law of air resistance. Throughout the nineteenth century, contrary to what happened before or after, ballistician were—with very rare exceptions—alone in trying to tackle the problem of air resistance. This was a complex problem where theoretical considerations, experimental results, and computational algorithms intermingled with one another, as well as with the development of new materials and doctrine in artillery. By carefully studying the reasons why ballisticians finally opted for a complex empirical law at the end of the nineteenth century, we show that military procedures for evaluating materials became a yardstick for assessing the worth of mathematical theories as well. In conclusion, we try to assess why military specialists were not able to face the challenges posed by World War I and required the help of civilian scientists and mathematicians. (shrink)

ArgumentOne of the first high-altitude observatories was a hotel. Established in 1823, the chalet on Mount Faulhorn became a highpoint of nineteenth-century science. In this paper, I take this mountain as my entry point into the examination of the special attraction that mountains exerted on scientists. I argue that Mount Faulhorn stood for three different conceptions of the usefulness of the mountain in science: (1) in observation networks, stations were usually chosen for pragmatic rather than scientific reasons, but mountains representedsingularspots (...) in such networks, which deserved special attention; (2) the mountain also was amicrocosmwhere altitude differences were thought to capture essential features of latitude differences; (3) the mountain was sometimes no more than amacro-toolfor the pursuit of science, just a middle ground between the heaven and the earth. (shrink)

ArgumentFrom 1893 to 1909 when it definitely sunk into the glacier, the Mont-Blanc Observatory (MBO) struggled to find its scientific purpose. In this article, we use recent literature on the social characterization of place to analyze this struggle. Our first goal is to investigate where the observatory may fit in the laboratory-field dyad. We investigate various kinds of conceptual “borderlands” between these places and look at the networking activities between particular knowledge production sites. We argue that part observatory, part laboratory, (...) and part field station, the place of the MBO was “heterotopic” space in Foucault's sense. We then examine the social underpinnings that led to the foundation of this observatory in the context of French Third Republic at the turn of the century. Following some of the ways the MBO was connected to other scientific sites and surveying some of its visitors' scientific practices, we finally hint at the fact that some of these practices played a part in the emergence of a regime of science production that endured into the twentieth century (astrophysical aeronautical practices, spatial stations, polar exploration, etc.). (shrink)