Innovatory advances by outsiders: The example of the amateur astronomer William Herschel. — Every scientific experience and perception has been gained from within a particular historical situation constituted by numerous components, both internal and external to a particular science, called praesentabilia (Präsentabilien). They enable and determine the scope and the experiental pale of any given science as well as its way and method of acquiring experience and knowledge. The interaction of such praesentabilia forms, what may be called the Historische Erfahrungsraum (...) (‘historical field of experience’), which each individual and/or (greater/smaller) group shares in respectively. A scientific (cultural, religious, social, disciplinal, etc.) community may be said to exist whereever the intersection of the various sets of praesentabilia making up its members' fields of experience comprises a minimum standard of praesentabilia that form this community, thus establishing its particular Historische(n) Erfahrungsraum. As long and as far someone outside the disciplinal community could acquaint himself with its praesentabilia in a selftaught manner, there will be outsiders and amateurs, who, while lacking any regular (and one‐sided) education and training, yet owning some extra praesentabilia, would be in a position to bring in novel methods of thinking and unconventional perceptions. There may be several reasons for this: (1) because they study fields that are not yet or no longer present in the disciplinal community, or (2) because they are not bound to the usual (uniform and standardized) instrumentation, or (3) because their social status does not seem from the professional scientific community (nor from the socio‐political community, conditional to the former's existence). Conversely they feel not being bound by the rules, the expectations and the aims posited by that scientific community. Since the disciplinal community lacks the praesentabilia that are prerequisite to fully understanding the outsider and amateur, he, in turn, has to overcome much more difficulties, till his innovatory perceptions are acknowledged. On the other hand, whenever his new methods, instruments or points of view prove to be helpful in solving an old problem of the disciplinal community, this solution will generally soon be acknowledged, in case its reproduction is sufficiently guaranteed by the traditional methods and by the usual instruments. Eventually the acknowledgement may lead to the approbation and the acceptance of the said methods, instruments and points of view, because the solution offered has by then become a praesentabile integral to the disciplinal community.The life and career of an outsider and amateur, like William Herschel, is a good instance of a whole range of potentialities of such innovatory advances. Considering these points, the paper deals with several aspects of Herschel's work: his new method of reviewing the heavens (Himmelsdurchmusterung) linked to his novel telescopes, — his discovery of the planet Uranus, — his discovery and verification of the existence of physical double stars, — his assumption of historicity and development of cosmic objects, — his determining the shape of the Milky Way by means of a primary method of stellar statistics, ‐ his discovery and determination of the sun's peculiar motion, ‐ and his discovery of the infra‐red radiant heat continuing the spectrum of the visible light. (shrink)

[Astrophysics contra astronomy] means the displacement of astrometry and stellar astronomy as the main and solely conceded branches of astronomy by the new astrophysics. This displacement started with the introduction of spectroscopic and photometric methods of observation in astronomy founded by J. C. F. Zoellner and W. Huggins in the late 1850s. It was Zoellner, too, who gave the methodical and intrumental foundations of the new branch called consciously [Astrophysik] by him, because it gives insight into the [physical constitution] of (...) the celestial bodies - whereas the traditional astronomy had been studying only the motions of the stars and other celestial bodies and refusing searches for the [physical constitution] as speculations not being proper to a member of the guild of astronomers. Until the middle of the nineteenth century this guild was led by F. W. Bessel who together with other members of his school brought forth the fundamental results of celestial mechanics and observational astronomy based on Newtonian physics extended to objects outside the solar system. Therefore already in the end of the 18th century, J. Chr. Lichtenberg had called astronomy the [paradigmatic] branch of all natural sciences; and therefore, Zoellner had to confirm the extension of the possibilities of experience through the same methodical certainty. The new methods, however, made their way only tardily , but later on, indeed, they pushed back the traditional branches of astronomy into the background - resuscitated only by new astrophysical formulations of old questions previously refused by traditional astronomy. (shrink)

Inspired by early-nineteenth-century discoveries about heat transfer, the French physicist Claude Pouillet measured the influx of solar radiation at the earth and, in 1838, asked what these observations revealed about the temperature of the sun and of space itself. At about the same time, the British natural philosophers John Herschel and J. D. Forbes made similar measurements in order to better understand the sun's influence on climate. This paper tells how and why Pouillet, Herschel and Forbes made the first estimates (...) of the solar constant, estimates which would acquire new importance with the discovery of the laws of thermodynamics by the mid century. (shrink)