Essay Review: How to Appropriate a World System,the Wittich Connection: Conflict and Priority in Late Sixteenth-Century Cosmology

See, e.g., Galison P. , How experiments end (Chicago, 1987).

My understanding of early modern priority disputes owes much to: Meli Bertoloni D. , “Public claims, private worries: Newton's Principia and Leibnitz's theory of planetary motion”; Iliffe R. , ‘“In the warehouse’: Intellectual property and priority in the early Royal Society”; and Johns A. , “Piracy and usurpation: The problems of natural philosophy publishing in the scientific revolution”. I thank these authors for their advice and for letting me see pre-publication drafts of their papers. I have profited also from Gross A. G. , “The rhetorical invention of scientific invention: The emergence and transformation of a social norm”, in Simons H. W. (ed.), Rhetoric in the human sciences (London, 1989), 89–107.

Dreyer J. L. E. , Tycho Brahe (Edinburgh, 1892; reprint New York, 1963); Schofield C. J. , Tychonic and semi-Tychonic world systems (New York, 1981); Thoren V. , “The comet of 1577 and Tycho Brahe's system of the world”, Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences , xxix (1979), 53–67.

Schofield , op. cit. ; Jardine N. , The birth of history and philosophy of science: Kepler's A defense of Tycho against Ursus with essays on its provenance and significance (Cambridge, 1984); Rosen E. , Three Imperial Mathematicians: Kepler trapped between Tycho Brahe and Ursus (New York, 1986).

The ‘defect’ in the diagram was the failure to portray the intersection of the orbs of Mars and the Sun. There are discrepancies between the various accounts put about by Tycho concerning Ursus's behaviour whilst visiting Hven in 1584, and this version may well have been contrived by Tycho to conceal the fact that, as Gingerich and Westman suggest, he had not at that date committed himself to the intersection of orbs.

On the social roles of astronomers in the sixteenth century see Westman's R. S. classic paper, “The astronomer's role in the sixteenth century: A preliminary study”, History of science , xviii (1980), 105–47; also Moran B. T. , “Christoph Rothmann, the Copernican theory, and institutional and technical influences in the criticism of Aristotelian cosmology”, Sixteenth century journal , xiii (1982), 85–108.

Gingerich Westman Allude in passing to the priority dispute between Cardano and Tartaglia over the solution of cubic equations. That dispute involved challenges and counter-challenges, and it would be interesting to know whether this was an isolated precedent.

Latour B. , “Visualization and cognition: Thinking with eyes and hands”, Knowledge and society , vi (1986), 1–40.

As Gingerich Westman observe, “The crucial point is that by casting the rearrangement of the heavens into an observational problem, Tycho had defined the question in terms of his own special competence and authority” (p. 70).

On the role of questions of equivalence of hypotheses in priority disputes see Bertoloni Meli , op. cit. (ref. 2).

There is a substantial recent literature on the roles of retrospection in the resolution of priority disputes. See, e.g., Woolgar S. , “Writing an intellectual history of scientific developments: The use of discovery accounts”, Social studies of science , vi (1976), 423–54; Brannigan A. , The social basis of scientific discoveries (Cambridge, 1981); Schaffer S. , “Scientific discoveries and the end of natural philosophy”, Social studies of science , xvi (1986), 387–420.