Thresholds

Whipple Museum of the History of Science Don Paterson

University of Cambridge Museums Arts Council England

Whipple Museum of the History of Science

Collection

Be inspired by the weird, the wonderful and the apparently ordinary at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science.  Our collection contains all kinds of objects related to science, from microscopes and telescopes to paper globes, wax embryo models and ship-shaped sundials.  Explore how people have used instruments and models to investigate and represent the world we live in.

Our collection contains all kinds of objects related to science, from microscopes and telescopes to paper globes, wax embryo models and ship-shaped sundials.  Each item can invite countless questions: here is just a taste of what you might explore.

Image: Little Professor calculator © the Whipple Museum (Wh.4529.207)

Why would a museum collect everyday objects like pocket calculators? Find out this and much, much more at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science.

Don Paterson

Poet

Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. He is the author of Nil Nil (1993), God's Gift to Women (1997) - winner of both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize - and Landing Light (2003), which won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. Rain, his most recent collection, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2009, the same year that he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Don Paterson

Resources

A Pocket Horizon Don Paterson

The idea, I guess, is on the kind of day

the vapours are sent down to blind and choke us

one still might gain some distance, much the way

this shotglass seems to give me a little focus

or this stone in my shoe some foothold on events.

Its disc of jet on three gold screws would do

for a doll’s house table at a doll’s house séance.

I’m trying to what exactly. Level with you?

 

Chin down on the bar-rail and one-eyed

to get it true and and straight and down to scale.

But my huge head looms above its tiny tide

and my breath is screaming like a winter gale

I think there's no one on the other side

O love, where is my white or my black sail

Whipple Museum of the History of Science

Blog

Archived posts
MAA reading Daphne Astor

How Are We Beguiled

09th March 2013 | one Comment(s) | Museum of Archaeology and AnthropologyWhipple Museum of the History of Science

In the world of Persian Astrolabes

the points of the curved spikes

mark the exact positions of the brightest stars

with their names labeled at the base of each spike:

Sirius, Canopus, Arcturus, Capella

 

Horary Quadrants – the pocket size 17thc. ivory altitude dials

tell the time from the height of the sun to the earth

or the hour of the night from the stars

and thereby the length of the day and the night

 

in the Ancient Chinese tradition of honoring history over observation

they gave the titles ‘imperial concubine’ and ‘celestial emperor’

to the constellations on their sky globes.

 

Today murky uncertainties linger between science and desire

and still mankind embroiders the tree of life with theories

while toying with pleasures that both mock and fulfill.

 

Is the Grand Orrery a mere fanciful heavenly charm

for it is unknown to female nightingales

who migrate in darkness

waiting for the males to sing

and call them down out of the sky.

 

 

Daphne Astor

one Comment(s)

Thresholds

Blog

Thresholds

Events

View all events

Museums Collections + Poets