Humboldtian science
[2][3] The example of Humboldt's life and his writings allowed him to reach out beyond the academic community with his natural history and address a wider audience with popular science aspects.
Humboldt was born in Berlin in 1769 and worked as a Prussian mining official in the 1790s until 1797 when he quit and began collecting scientific knowledge and equipment.
[7] Examining the interconnectedness of vegetation and its respective environment is one of the new and important aspects of Humboldt's work, an idea labeled as "terrestrial physics," something that scientists who preceded him, such as Linnaeus, failed to do.
[9] According to Cannon, Humboldtian science is, "the accurate, measured study of widespread but interconnected real phenomena in order to find a definite law and a dynamical cause.
Towards the turn of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant became interested in understanding where species derived from, and was less concerned with an organism's physical attributes.
Next, Johann Reinhold Forster, one of Humboldt's future partners, became interested in the study of vegetation as an essential way of understanding nature and its relationship with human society.
[14] According to Malcolm Nicholson, "Susan Cannon characterized Humboldtian science as synthetic, empirical, quantitative and impossible to fit into any one of our twentieth century disciplinary boundaries.
"[9] A central element of Humboldtian science was its use of the latest advances in scientific instrumentation to observe and measure physical variables, while attending to all possible sources of error.
Essentially Humboldt's new scientific approach required a new type of scientist: Humboldtian science demanded a transition from the naturalist to the physicist.
Humboldt explains: "The general equilibrium which reigns amongst disturbances and apparent turmoil, is the result of infinite number of mechanical forces and chemical attractions balancing each other out.
Humboldtian science promotes the idea that the more forces that are accurately measured over more of the earth's surface results in a greater understanding of the order of nature.
The link between the balancing equilibrium of natural forces and organism distribution is evident when Humboldt states: As in all other phenomena of the physical universe, so in the distribution of organic beings: amidst the apparent disorder which seems to result from the influence of a multitude of local causes, the unchanging law of nature become evident as soon as one surveys an extensive territory, or uses a mass of facts in which the partial disturbances compensate one another.
[24] According to Humboldtian science, nature's order and equilibrium emerged "gradually and progressively from laborious observing, averaging, and mapping over increasingly extended areas.
Some such participants included French naval officers, East India Company physicians, Russian provincial administrators, Spanish military commanders, and German diplomats.
[27] Humboldt's projects, particularly those related to natural philosophy, played a significant role in the influx of European money and travelers to Spanish America in increasing numbers in the early 19th century.
Also, British scientist George Gabriel Stokes depended heavily on abstract mathematical measurement to deal with error in a precision instrument, certainly Humboldtian science.
[29] The promotion and development of terrestrial physics under Humboldtian science produced not only useful maps and statistics, but offered both European and Creole societies tools for essentially 're-imaging' America.
"[31] In recent years, historian Andreas Daum has explored the history of Humboldtian science as a concept and suggests a fundamental revision.
Especially in his early years before leaving Europe to the Americas in 1799, Humboldt's research was impromptu, marked by epistemological and personal insecurities, and embedded in his peripatetic way of living.
[35] A review of Humboldtian science encourages historians to study standards of ‘objectivity’ and the belief in instruments yieding precise results as its guarantee.
