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dc.contributor.authorFriedman, Robert Marc
dc.date.accessioned2013-05-23T08:47:32Z
dc.date.available2013-05-23T08:47:32Z
dc.date.issued2012
dc.description.abstractThe article provides an introduction to a on-going research project based at University of Tromsø that seeks to analyze the history of efforts to make sense of the aurora borealis from the early 1700s through to the Cold War. Following brilliant displays of the northern lights in the early eighteenth century, natural philosophers strove to explain this phenomenon that evoked widespread fear and superstition. It was not until well into the twentieth century that consensual explanation emerged for this, one of the great enigmas in the history of science. From the start, the quest to explain the aurora borealis became enmeshed with patriotic science and nationalist sentiments. The history of efforts to understand the nature and cause of the aurora poses a number of thematic problems. Being a fleeting and at times rapidly changing phenomenon, only occasionally seen south of far-northern latitudes, the aurora needed to be constituted as an object able to be brought into the domain of rational science. Observational accounts of the aurora came most often from by personsliving or travelling in the far north or in the Arctic, but these persons were generally not trained scientists: Whose witnessing counted and how was authority negotiated among professional scientists and amateurs?en
dc.identifier.citationNordlit 29(2012) s. 59-68en
dc.identifier.cristinIDFRIDAID 927351
dc.identifier.issn0809-1668
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10037/5172
dc.identifier.urnURN:NBN:no-uit_munin_4880
dc.language.isoengen
dc.publisherUniversity of Tromsøen
dc.publisherUniversitetet i Tromsøen
dc.rights.accessRightsopenAccess
dc.subjectVDP::Humaniora: 000::Historie: 070en
dc.subjectVDP::Humanities: 000::History: 070en
dc.subjectAurora borealisen
dc.subjectscience in the far northen
dc.subjectpolar researchen
dc.subjecthistory of s cienceen
dc.title"Making Sense of the Aurora: A Research Project"en
dc.typeJournal articleen
dc.typeTidsskriftartikkelen
dc.typePeer revieweden


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