{"id":1327,"date":"2008-05-19T22:05:51","date_gmt":"2008-05-20T05:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=1327"},"modified":"2012-08-18T20:01:02","modified_gmt":"2012-08-19T03:01:02","slug":"the-joy-of-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=1327","title":{"rendered":"The joy of science"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m reading a new biography of Maria Mitchell, <em>Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the Romantics<\/em>. Mitchell, the first American woman who was a professional astronomer, and probably the most famous American woman scientist of the 19th C., said this about the joys of watching the skies:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The aurora is always a pleasant companion, a meteor seems to come like a messenger from departed spirits and even the blossoming of the trees in the moonlight becomes a sight looked for with pleasure. And from astronomy there is the enjoyment as a night upon the housetops with the stars as in the midst of other grand scenery. There is the same subdued quiet and grateful sensuousness &#8212; a calm to the troubled spirit and a hope to the desponding.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I suspect I&#8217;ll have more about this biography after I finish it.<\/p>\n<p><em>(Mitchell plays a minor role in my mother&#8217;s family folklore. My mother&#8217;s family comes from Nantucket, where Mitchell spent the first four decades of her life; and Mitchell left the Quakers to join the Nantucket Unitarian church where my mother&#8217;s family attended worship. I remember hearing about Mitchell as a child &#8212; mostly I remember learning to pronounce her first name &#8220;muh-RYE-ah,&#8221; not &#8220;mah-REE-ah.&#8221;)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m reading a new biography of Maria Mitchell, Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the Romantics. Mitchell, the first American woman who was a professional astronomer, and probably the most famous American woman scientist of the 19th C., said this about the joys of watching the skies: &#8220;The aurora is always [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[556,555,203],"class_list":["post-1327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature","tag-maria-mitchell","tag-nantucket","tag-unitarian-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1327"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8130,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1327\/revisions\/8130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}