Skip to main content

Louise Devoy - Five Way Interview

Dr Louise Devoy is Senior Curator at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, UK. Louise has a background in astrophysics and the history of science. She has worked at various museums in the UK and is interested in astronomical instruments, women in astronomy and historic observatories. She is author of Royal Observatory Greenwich: A History in Objects, published to celebrate the Observatory’s 350th anniversary in 2025. 

Why science?

I'm curious about the world around me and science is great way to ask questions. I love digging into the history of science to see how our ideas have changed over time and to appreciate how science runs in parallel with the trends of the period, whether it's improving navigation for trade or using innovative technologies to create exciting new fields of study.

Why this book?

Various books have been written about certain aspects of the Observatory's history (longitude, timekeeping, the Astronomers Royal etc) but I wanted to do something more holistic that that showed how astronomers at Greenwich worked across many different topics including magnetism, meteorology, weights and standards, astrophysics, and even measuring the density of the Earth.  I've spent the past five years rummaging through the collection stores and archives to pick out the most interesting (and surprising!) objects, some of which have never have been highlighted before. It's a quirky mixture of technical objects (telescopes, clocks, instruments) along with less obvious objects that give us an insight into what it was like to live and work on site.

What has been the most lasting impact of the Royal Observatory Greenwich? 

It's the global reference location for time and longitude. Every time you look at a watch or a map, you're relying on the countless people who worked here to transform star data into essential information for coordinating time across navigation, travel and trade.

What’s next?

We're working on First Light, which is our ambitious project to completely transform the Observatory site by 2028 with more engaging and accessible displays and facilities. Check our website for more details. 

What’s exciting you at the moment?

We've been working with NAROO colleagues at Paris Observatory to digitise around 2,000 photographic glass plates taken here in Greenwich from 1893-1908. For scientists, these plates offer a fossilised record of how the sky looked over a century ago, giving them the chance to calculate tiny shifts in star positions over time. For historians, these plates give us an insight into the life and work of the astronomers during that period, including the 'lady computers' who were the first women to work as professional astronomers at Greenwich. It's amazing how these small square pieces of glass can give us so much information!

These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...
Post a Comment
Read more