RIP: Noel Swerdlow (1941-2021)

My graduate school classmate at The University of Chicago, Matt Kerrigan Frank, alerted me to the fact that Noel Swerdlow recently passed away. (See this obit.)

I met Noel on one of the first days in graduate school back in September 1995. The seminar room was busy filling up with faculty and graduate students from philosophy and history of science for one of the many, weekly joint seminars I would attend during the next seven years. I was trying to impress David Malament with my knowledge of the Huygens/Newton debate which I had been researching under the guidance of George Smith (one of my undergrad gurus). An old crank -- I now realize he was then barely older than I am now-- interrupted my narrative to tell me that Huygens' objections to Newton's inverse law were primarily metaphysical. I tried to explain to the guy that Koyré's view had been refuted (by George and me). I never get a chance. I asked David, "who is that old man?" and he informed me it was Noel Swerdlow.

Over the next few years I saw Noel in action at the various joint seminars: often abrasive and impatient, but at times quite brilliant. Some of his exchanges with visiting scholars could be quite spirited. (His exchange with Motti Feingold was legendary, but they were or became close friends.)

My relationship with Noel evolved once he spent some time away at Dibner (where George had become director). After we met again on campus, he told me with a big smile "you could have told me about all the archival research that went into the Huygens paper [see here]. I thought you were just bluffing. It's really marvelous work--I love the argument with the maps." I meekly tried to say, "i tried." But something had changed, I was now on his good side. And to receive a compliment from Noel (or anyone in graduate school) was one of the highlights of my graduate career.

He was famous for his work on Babylonian astronomy (he was a student of the legendary Otto Neugebauer), but I have to admit that as a PhD student I loved learning about Copernicus and his (obscure to me) peers from Noel. I also have a memory of him playing piano, but I have not seen this mentioned in any obituary so maybe I am confused. We discovered our shared love for opera at the Lyric, and I always looked forward to seeing him there. (He was very learned on opera.)

When I was nearly done with my PhD, I had the luminous idea to ask him to read Adam Smith's posthumous "History of Astronomy" with me. This piece was central to my dissertation. I was delighted he agreed, and even more that he had never read it before. (I always assumed Noel pretty much had read everything.) I expected that Noel would be extremely critical of Smith as a historian (as the editors of the Oxford edition are). But Noel was, in fact, quite impressed with Smith's historical acumen and, more importantly, gave me a graduate seminar on all the possible sources Smith could have consulted during the 18th century. He also flattered my vanity in assuming that I was intimately familiar with all the works of Regiomantus, Riccioli, and Peuerbach. Often after our reading group at The Medici I had to go to special collections to figure out what he was saying. (This was before the age of google.books!)

Later, when I realized I had bombed out on the job-market first time around, he even helped me apply (and wrote a letter) for a project on Smith as historian of astronomy. But that was not funded.

At the time, i assumed it was normal for historians of astronomy to have a position in an astronomy department.  So, I later used that as an argument for my paper on "philosophy and a scientific future of the history of economics" But I have learned it is much less common (although archeoastronomy is sometimes practices by professional astronomers). 

That paper was part of a rather contentious symposium. organized by Paola Tubaro & Erik Angner. To be clear the symposium was lovely but our audience of established historians were underwhelmed. I think referees managed to prevent bublication of some of the papers.
Anyway, my core idea was that the history of economy theories could play an evidential role in present day economics as the custodians of the theories and data of the past. This was not well received at all. But it let to an invitation by Bertram Schefold to reflect on the possibilities and significance of economic history. I did not know much about the practice of economic history. But as I was musing about the invite, I wondered what the oldest economic data might be. The hunch being that if you have data very far apart this might help you to calibrate important measures.  So on a lark I googled (!) "Babylonian economics" and I was directed to Alice Louise Slotsky The Bourse of Babylon Market Quotations in the Astronomical Diaries of Babylonia, which I read and loved.

I was astonished to learn that the very clay tablets with astronomical data Noel had studied also had economic data on them! I started drafting one of the craziest and fun papers I ever wrote, "Prophecy, eclipses and whole-sale markets: A case study on why data driven economic history requires history of economics, a philosopher’s reflection." [published in Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte/Economic History Yearbook 50.1 (2009): 195-206.]

With some trepidation I sent an early draft to Noel. Rather than scolding me for my amateurishness (this was the initial response of some of my Leiden colleagues who were experts on ancient Mesopatamia--I think they really thought I was crazy), he wrote lengthy letters on the quality of the data that I wanted to use. (The published version of the paper includes excerpts from his letters to me. ) Nobody seems to have read this paper, but it was good enough for me that Noel (who called my attention to relevant other scholars) took it seriously enough to try to help me improve it.

In later years, Noel would always read works I sent him. Sometimes even my blog. Even when I relied on impeccable scholarship of others, he would correct mistakes that had crept into now famous scholarly works. My favorite letter, however, is this one-liner, "Take it down; it's nonsense!--Noel."

Comments

[Marius Stan]

A very memorable line in an elegiac piece by Borges goes, "one day the last eyes that had seen Jesus closed forever." That's how I felt when Gideon Manning told me about Noel's passing. There won't be another one like him for a century or more; fortunately for us, when his history of Renaissance astronomy comes out, we won't need another one for a century or more. Based on what I've seen, it'll be better than Delambre and Dreyer combined.

Noel had started out as a grad student in history of Medieval musicology, I believed. Hence his talent for chamber music, which he loved to play at the end of parties at his house. Maybe that early background was the secret to his uncanny talent for seeing patterns -- the music of the spheres -- deep behind tables of declination and right ascension, from Ptolemy and al-Battani to the Rudolphine Tables. A mind equally adept at synthesizing from historical context and analyzing data, of various quality, ranging from the Maragha School to Tycho.

Two small, but telling testaments to the quality of his character. During my years at Caltech, he never once told me that he had single-handedly revolutionized our understanding of Copernicus. While barely out of grad school, Noel had figured out that Copernicus' three-circle planetary model had been anticipated -- in every respect but the heliocentric choice of frame -- by ibn al-Shatir, over a century before Copernicus, in Syria. And, he was an animal lover, and outstanding dog dad. A decade ago, when I was down the hallway from him, I'd always see him in the coffee lounge with his sweet dog, Ariel, who loved him to bits, and would never leave his side. Requiescat in pacem.

[Stephen Menn]

Wow. I was there at the encounter with Moti Feingold, and still remember it vividly. That was a very long time ago.

I'm very sorry to hear about Noel. I never took one of his courses, although my grad school girlfriend Heather Blair did and I kibitzed. But I saw him in the History of Disciplines workshop and in lots of other events. I had some good conversations with him over the years, and I was inspired by a lot of his writing, especially The Babylonian Theory of the Planets, also the Copernicus work. I'm very glad his colleagues will see his Renaissance astronomy book to publication--it's what all of us hope for ourselves. I'll miss him.

[Stephen Menn]

Another Noel memory. Sometime in the early or mid-80's there was a lecture series of visiting scholars talking about the sciences and the humanities. There would be two speakers per afternoon, in the big lecture hall on the first floor of Swift. There was a good speaker who Noel, and a bunch of us, wanted to hear, but if you went to one talk you were there for both of the afternoon's talks. The other speaker's talk was bemoaning the gap between the Two Cultures, and at one point he wanted to project on the screen a bunch of old photos of famous late-19th-century scientists playing the violin, which was supposed to demonstrate that the Two Cultures had not yet diverged at that time. The speaker asked someone to turn off the light so that he could show these photographs. Noel protested, very loudly, "*some* of us are trying to *work*"--in such a way that those of us who *weren't* trying to work through the talk, and *didn't* protest against turning off the lights, felt ashamed of ourselves.

[Pierre Paquette]

I never had the chance to meet Pr. Swerdlow, but in reading his book Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus and trying to make a computer model out of it, I had a few questions, so I googled him and found his email address at the University of Chicago. I thought “why not?” and wrote to him.

We only exchanged a few messages, but they gave me an impression that was confirmed by reading this post and the comments on it: that he was sometimes “rough,“ but deep inside, a very nice man.

It’s when I had a few more questions about the book, a few months later and just a few days ago, and that I googled again for published errata to it (which I didn’t remember if I had found online or not), that I found out he had passed away. The news shook me despite the fact that I didn’t know him personally…

The email exchange I had with him was in early June, about a month and a half before he passed away. His reply to my first message did mention that he “might be dying soon.”

I really wish I could follow his path, despite being almost 50, but I can’t find any “History of astronomy” online university class (except one at the University of Toronto, but it lasts only two hours, so I probably know everything from its curriculum already)…

[Marius Stan]

Yeah, well, Noel was the last person who could teach a history of mathematical astronomy. So, now that he's passed, the world is left without one.

[Nadia Swerdlow]

Hello Everyone: This is Nadia Swerdlow, Noel's wife. Someone ent me this page, and I so enjoyed reading your memories of him. I held a memorial for him last month, and will have a recording of it. Mike Turner from the University of Chicago spoke at it, as did Anthony Grafton and Jed Buchwald. If you would like to watch the memorial, please send me your email to [email protected] Again, I so much enjoy reading remembrances of my husband. Nadia Swerdlow