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Chapitre d'ouvrage Année : 2022

A Hundred Years Ago: The Birth of the IAU as a Model for Other Scientific Unions (1919)

Résumé

The date of 28 July 1919 is a familiar landmark in the history of the International Astronomical Union. This paper sets the foundation of the Union in Brussels on that day in the context of the major reordering of both science and international politics that took place after the Great War. Mindful of the powerful position of German science before 1914, the victorious Allies fashioned a structure, based on a new International Research Council and unions for the individual sciences, from which the Central Powers, Germany in particular, were excluded. Founded at the same time as the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, the IAU served, in its structure and statutes, as a model for other disciplinary unions, even for the IRC itself. Although twelve Allied countries were present in Brussels, prominent figures in the scientific academies of just three nations-France, Britain, and the USA-were the main architects of both the IAU and the IRC. The task, in which purely scientific priorities of efficiency and coordination of effort interacted with diplomatic objectives, was fraught with complexity. Even the Allied position was not uniform. Behind an outward show of consensus, correspondence between Emile Picard, Arthur Schuster, and George Ellery Hale (all of them centrally involved in the founding of the union) and debates in their respective national academies reveal significant differences of perspective, notably on the pressing question of the possible admission of nations that had been neutral during the war.
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Dates et versions

halshs-04354688, version 1 (19-12-2023)

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Danielle Fauque, Robert Fox. A Hundred Years Ago: The Birth of the IAU as a Model for Other Scientific Unions (1919). Astronomers as Diplomats. When the IAU Builds Bridges Between Nations, Springer International Publishing, pp.81-140, 2022, Historical & Cultural Astronomy, 978-3-030-98624-7. ⟨10.1007/978-3-030-98625-4_3⟩. ⟨halshs-04354688⟩
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Dernière date de mise à jour le 28/04/2024
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