Abstract
Thomas Hockey has a little list of awful astronomers through history.
History can be troubling, as I learned while editing the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Astronomers in the past have behaved badly – and I do not just mean Tycho Brahe flogging his tenants, but rather outrageous, methodologically impaired and devious individuals who (for at least a time) entered the profession as wolves in sheep's clothing. Although my list comes from the history of the subject, they continue to disturb our worldview, the one that holds that a successful scientist is usually rational and holds certain communal values.
I start my list with Nicholaus Reymers Bar (c. 1584), or, as he styled himself, “Ursus”. This man ingratiated himself with Brahe and then made off with Brahe's life work, proffering the illustrious observer's ideas as his own. And it worked – Ursus became the imperial mathematician to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. He was succeeded by Johannes Kepler.
Any such list must include Thomas Jefferson Jackson See (1866–1962). See was an astronomer with a PhD in the employ of Lowell Observatory – until his dismissal. On what cause? Observatory records are obscure, citing “secret excesses, which if continued at See's age, are almost incurable, leading in the end to insanity or idiocy”. Further, Andrew Douglass complained that the young See “has written four articles … in which only two ideas are original with him. All the rest came from my conversations or publications, or the publications of others, and his articles were published during my absence. He is now writing a new book and I know that he has copied many pages from G H Darwin's works.” What does a disgraced astronomer like See do? Become a government contractor, of course. See went to work for the US Navy, while he visually “discovered” planets orbiting other stars. With no access to good data, he returned to plagiarism, using the work of theorists such as Forest Moulton on solar system cosmogony. See retired after more than 30 years as a professional astronomer and lived to be 96.
Amateur charlatans
Monied amateur astronomers also err. Serbian journalist Spiridion Gopcˇevic´ (1855–perhaps 1928) took the opportunity of marrying a rich woman to reinvent himself and fund his career as an astronomer under the pseudonym Leo Brenner. He started out producing credible planetary drawings, notably of Jupiter, from his private observatory on the Adriatic. He regularly published in the Astronomische Nachrichten and Observatory. He then observed the polar “ice caps” of Mercury, the “oceans” of Venus (between breaks in the clouds), new (imagined) gaps in Saturn's rings and surface features on Uranus. He also said that he could resolve the stars within the Andromeda Nebula, all with telescopes of the size and aperture you and I played with in secondary school.
Psychiatrist and astronomer William Sheehan counts a record 134 martian canals drawn by Brenner. You should realize there's a problem when even Percival Lowell no longer believes in your Mars observations. When Lowell complained, Brenner sneered, as translated by Martin Stangl for Sky & Telescope: “We only wish Mr Lowell that he, together with his capital telescopes, won't fall into one of those broad and … deep crevices.” NASA's Astrophysics Data System lists 52 publications by Brenner, all produced before he was banned by major journals.
Comet inventor
Less well known is French soldier/physician Chevalier d'Angos (1744–1833) of the Knights Hospitaller. D'Angos worked as an astronomer at the Grand Master's observatory on Malta, until he accidentally burned it down. All the observatory records were destroyed, the instruments damaged and d'Angos crept back to France. Less accidental, though, was d'Angos's telescopic capture of a comet in 1793. He reported his discovery to Charles Messier, who informed d'Angos that he had instead observed two Messier Catalogue objects – M68 on one night, and M83 on another. Before that, in 1784, he had “discovered” another comet, one that he had simply invented. Later, Johann Encke was astute enough to figure out from d'Angos's supposed data that the comet's orbit was contrived.
For his third stab at immortality, in 1798, d'Angos conjured a comet with a plausible orbit, the same as the comet of 1672. D'Angos's 1798 comet supposedly transited the Sun, leaving little opportunity for annoying attempts at a confirmatory observation. This ruse could have worked: d'Angos's data was indeed commensurate with the orbit of the 1672 comet. Unfortunately, it turns out that that orbit, published by fellow countryman Joseph-Jerome Delande, was a misprint. The 1798 comet was either an enormous coincidence, or one created to match the (incorrectly positioned) comet of 1672. History has chosen the latter interpretation.
Failing to forge a comet, d'Angos went on to discover “Planet Vulcan”, orbiting the Sun more closely than Mercury, an “observation” that persists in fake news today. According to Thomas Webb, at the turn of the 19th century, respected asteroid-chaser Baron Janos von Zach referred to any “egregious, astronomical blunder” as an “angosiade”. d'Angos had found fame, of a sort.
None of these individuals was an outsider, all were accepted by the astronomical establishment of their time. When I was a child, my Golden Book of Great Scientists was silent on such personalities. It is the historian's job to put them into the picture as best we can – and remind us that even established astronomers can behave badly.
