Edgley, Patrick; (2024) The Astronomers’ World. The Practice and Failure of the Scientific Universe. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

In this project, I approach ‘western’, scientific cosmology within an anthropological framing. To explore how this cosmos is sought out and engaged with practically and phenomenologically, I conducted fieldwork with amateur astronomers in London, UK, and interrogated the particular positionality of these people and their practices within science and the world at large. In particular, this thesis is an exploration of scientific and cosmological failure, emerging from the claim consistently made or affirmed by astronomers that “the perfect image is impossible”. By following the process of astronomical image-making through astronomers’ engagement with place, practice, and images, I chart the course of this material failure, as they seek to manage photons into an objective view of the cosmos. Here, I approach astronomical practice as a revolutionary effort to access the obscured nature of the world, and approach its failure through the impossible task astronomers set themselves of effacing the human world—the biases and assumptions understood to do this obfuscation—from their images. Understood in this way, I assert that astronomy, and indeed science more broadly, is fundamentally cosmopolitical, seeking to reorient the relationship between humans and the world they study. Broadening the scope of this failure, therefore, I explore here how this reorientation and the world it produces fails—how the scientific natives and would-be-moderns that perform astronomy face a world that seems to no longer function both in and beyond astronomy—and how this cosmological failure is felt and contextualised on the ground in and around astronomical practice. I claim that while astronomy continually and inescapably fails as an effort to produce perfect, objective images of the cosmos, this seemingly futile practice can be made sense of in terms of a therapeutic function: as a practice that identifies and explores the particular troubling and apocalyptic nature of ‘now,’ and produces earthly communities that can collectively muddle through and manage the pessimistic condition in which they find themselves.

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