Linnaeus on and in the clouds

Horace Bénédict de Saussure on the Roche Michel, Alexander von Humboldt on Mount Chimborazo, John Tyndall on the Matterhorn, Alfred Wegener on the Greenland Ice Sheet – the list of famous scientists who were also famous mountaineers is long. This session will consider another, lesser-known example: Carl Linnaeus, whose name is associated with natural history rather than the pursuit of physical sciences.

However, during his journey to Lapland in 1732, he became involved in a vicious debate about physics with the local parson and school master of Jokkmokk, a small market town in Swedish Lapland. The two representatives of the local elite wanted to convince the travelling medical student from Uppsala that clouds were solid, and the highlands therefore barren because all trees and creatures would be scraped away, as it were. Linnaeus protested, relying on the latest accounts of atmospheric physics, and the question would continue to haunt him when he later crossed the glaciers covering the mountain range separating Sweden from Norway. The Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, which supported Linnaeus’ journey, had not had enough funds to equip Linnaeus with a barometer, a fact he regretted, as it could have helped him to leave a mark on contemporary debates about the ‘weight’ of air.

We will explore these episodes for what they can tell us about how scientific authority is established from remote places, the role that instruments play in this, and in what relation purportedly universal knowledge stands to knowledge gained on the ground.