M&D p 6: the Distance to a Star

[alice malice]

The Sun is a star. And our boys take measurements of its distance and
calculate and so on, but these Times are not that easy to measure nor
calculate. So, the scientific reading of the metaphor seems to miss
the point that Science can't measure these Times, and especially these
Times in America.

http://www.mdlpp.org/pdf/library/CharlesMasonandJeremiahDixon.pdf

On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 8:43 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> "...for the Times are as impossible to calculate, this Advent, as the
> Distance to a Star."
>
> That's a loaded simile for 18th-century astronomy, especially with the many
> references coming up to Mason's boss, Astronomer Royal James Bradley.
> Bradley had attempted unsuccessfully in the 1720s  to determine the distance
> to a star by stellar parallax: the change in its position between Obs six
> months and ~185 million miles apart, as the earth moves halfway around its
> orbit. But the angle was too small to detect with the instruments of the
> time; Bessel would succeed in 1838. (Parallax -> distance measurements
> within our solar system were easier, cf. p. 93.)
>
> I wouldn't put it past Pynchon to have in mind a later echo, beloved of
> astronomers and triumphalist historians of science. In 1835 sociologist and
> philosopher Auguste Comte wrote that "we would never know how to investigate
> by any means [the stars'] chemical composition... every notion of the true
> mean temperatures of the stars will necessarily always be concealed from
> us." Unknown to Comte, Fraunhofer had already described the bright and dark
> lines in the spectra of the Sun and a few bright stars. Kirchhoff, Bunsen
> and others would identify the lines with incandescent elements, letting us
> determine both composition and temperature (as well as crucial foundation
> ideas and data for quantum theory).
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l