Pendulum in the Tropics: The Académie des Sciences and the Globalization of Science, c. 1670-1740 - A talk by Nick Dew February 26, 2010

Tate Laboratory of Physics, Room 131

In the last half of the seventeenth century, scientific practice became "globalized" on an unprecedented scale. One key part of that story was the work of the French Académie des Sciences, which organized a series of expeditions to locations around the Atlantic basin. These sites--Gorée in Senegambia, Cayenne in Guyana, Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean--were the recently-acquired bases of the French slave-trade companies. The possibilities for natural philosophy that long-range commerce provided were realized by Gian-Domenico Cassini (I), Louis XIV’s star astronomer. From the Paris Observatoire, Cassini was able to coordinate the missions to the tropics, the data from which was seen as essential to the “perfection of astronomy and geography”. This paper will explore how global networks made a difference, as much to the new mathematical natural philosophy as to the natural historical field sciences, by following the fortunes of one controversial measurement--the length of a seconds pendulum at tropical latitudes--which was to play a role in the early eighteenth century's debates over the Newtonian theory of the earth.
Nicholas Dew is a professor of History at McGill University. He came to McGill in 2004 from Cambridge University, where he was a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow and a Research Fellow of St Catharine’s College. His interests are in the cultural history of France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly the history of science, travel, and oriental studies. His first book, Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford University Press, 2009), maps the place of scholarly orientalism within the intellectual culture of France in the late seventeenth century. His current book project is a history of the trans-Atlantic dimensions of French science in the period 1670-1760. With James Delbourgo, he edited Science and Empire in the Atlantic World(Routledge, 2008), a collection of essays which began life as a workshop at UCLA's Clark Library. Dew has recently been a Dibner Fellow in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library, and an Inter-Americas Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library. In 2009, he was awarded a SSHRC Standard Research Grant for his project "Science and Empire in the French Atlantic World".

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