Spectroscopy in Utrecht: A Brief History

Verbunt, F.; Bleeker, J. A. M.

doi:10.1007/s11214-010-9727-y

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 17 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…54 Molenaar 2003. 55 Heijmans 1994Verbunt and Bleeker 2010. expeditions, including the one of 1926 to Sumatra, and in 1933 he made a lecture tour of astronomical institutes in the US and Canada. Finally, in 1937, he succeeded A.A. Nijland as professor of astronomy in Utrecht -not without controversy, because the former Flemish nationalist had in the meantime become a radical communist with strong internationalist convictions.…”

Section: Astronomy As a Disciplinementioning

confidence: 99%

Anton Pannekoek

Tai¹,

Steen²,

Dongen³

2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Astronomer and Marxist Anton Pannekoek was a remarkable figure. As an astronomer, he pioneered quantitative astrophysics and founded the renowned Astronomical Institute in Amsterdam that now carries his name. Before World War I, however, he was employed as a Marxist theorist by the Social Democratic Party of Germany, making him one of the leading intellectuals of international socialism. Because of his significant contributions to such diverse subjects as astronomy and socialism, Pannekoek's life and work uniquely capture the fascinating connections between conceptions of nature, society, and their representations in the early decades of the twentieth century. This book aims to study these connections through the prism of Pannekoek's biography. In doing so, it sets out to explain Pannekoek's particular epistemic, aesthetic, and political choices, while placing them in the broader context of the early twentieth century.Pannekoek tried to keep connections between his political and academic life hidden from view. He had pragmatic reasons to do so. His academic career had suffered from his controversial political reputation on more than one occasion, most dramatically in 1919 when his appointment to deputy director of the Leiden Observatory was obstructed by the Dutch government. 1 From the mid-1910s onwards, he kept his socialist efforts at a distance from his career in astronomy, and even ended up writing two separate autobiographies: one focusing on his career in the labour movement, while the other discussed his astronomical research. 2 Remarkably, this separation has been carried over into scholarship on his life and work. This either discusses Pannekoek's role in the labour

show abstract

Section: Astronomy As a Disciplinementioning

confidence: 99%