Séminaire – Histoire et philosophie de la physique

Alisa Bokulich (Université de Boston)

« Howhigh the mountain, how low the sea ? A history of the quest for high-precision global height measurements. »
In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries many leading figures, such as Alexander von Humboldt, got caught up in the quest for the world’s tallest mountain. To compare the heights of mountains on distant continents, however, one needs to have a common zero point—or vertical datum—from which they are measured. Following on the tidal research of William Whewell, mean sea level became increasingly used as the common zero from which mountain heights could be meaningfully compared. But is sea level really level ? In this talk, Bokulich traces the history of high-precision global height measurements in geophysics, and how this quest revealed many surprising discrepancies, leading to a proliferation of several key scientific concepts—including the concept of ‘height’ itself. More broadly, it is a story about learning how to measure a Heraclitean world when there is no Archimedean point on which to stand.

Matthias Dörries (Université de Strasbourg)

« Epistemic scarcity in the geophysical sciences »
Major natural hazards happen at irregular, often widely interspersed, time intervals, and therefore resist easy fit into scientists’ research agenda. “Epistemic scarcity” refers to the dilemma that paleontologists face when their chosen objects of research deliver few or no new empirical data (see Adrian Currie, 2021). I will look at epistemic scarcity in the geophysical sciences via 20th-century case studies in volcanology and seismology to explore how geophysicists develop strategies and shift practices to deal both with long droughts and abrupt overflows of data. These two case studies suggest that there are research strategies specific to geosciences in the face of the epistemic challenge of data scarcity.

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