How Tycho's Legacy Informed Flamsteed and Herschel's Work

Synopsis:

Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) is remembered today – if at all – for his systematic programme of astronomical observation that yielded the data from which Johannes Kepler would derive his laws of planetary motion. Tycho’s pursuit of precision and accuracy, supported by a team of trained collaborators and an arsenal of innovative instruments of his own design, has cast him as an early champion of empirical enquiry and a progenitor of the ‘scientific method’. Yet this teleological narrative obscures the motivations that guided Tycho’s own practices. What goals did he envisage for his science, and how did his contemporaries and successors interpret and evaluate his work?

By examining the ways in which Tycho and later astronomers presented and mobilised his scientific achievements, this talk considers how his modern reputation as a preeminent observational astronomer was constructed. Attending to this retrospective appropriation, I argue, reveals how scientific reputations are shaped not…