On Eclipses and Scientific Thinking: Simon Newcomb, Mark Twain, Ernst Mayr, and Bing Crosby
What do Newcomb, Twain, Mayr, and Crosby have in common? No, they aren't a 60s folk rock band. The answer is that they all tell us something interesting about the cultural power of the eclipse. 28 March 2006 Solar Eclipse, courtesy of NASA What is most interesting about them is the way they reflect various ideas about the capacity for scientific thinking among Americans and others, past and present. This occurred to me while reading Matt Stanley's very interesting article , "Predicting the Past," from the second number of Isis this year (2012). Stanley traces changing attitudes toward the role of history in astronomy and astronomy in history. His centerpiece is a disagreement between Greenwich's Astronomer Royal, George Airy, and the head of the American Nautical Almanac , Simon Newcomb. Airy turned to ancient Greek sources for data on past eclipses that could help him calculate the "secular acceleration"of the moon , a small but crucial constant neces