THE BURDEN AND THE PROMISE OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH IN DIFFICULT TIMES LEWIS PYENSON Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA 70504-0831, USA Abstract. Difficult times may drive scientists and scholars to innovate. The notion is examined through the early career of historian of science George Sarton. A new departure is proposed for the unsettling present: sending a poet, an artist and a musician to the International Space Station. Keywords: George Sarton, Philip Stratford, International Space Station The last great philosopher of the Encyclop´ edie hid out in Paris. He had been con- demned by Convention as a Girondist and subversive for having disputed the con- stitution enacted by the Committee of Public Safety. His guardian, the widow of the sculptor Vernet, took care of him at great personal risk. To distract Condorcet from the thought of fleeing his refuge, his friends persuaded him, from the summer of 1793 through March 1794, to write the Sketch of a Picture of the Progress of the Hu- man Mind; a number of additional memoirs on a wide range of subjects also issued from his pen, and some of them were published anonymously. The Sketch defines the nine ages of human history, and in some sense it is the model that is still taught in schools. The last age of modernity heralded by Descartes, ends with the French Revolution. In a 10th age, there would be equality among nations and classes, and continual perfecting of the human condition. Condorcet held all knowledge to be his province, and he acquitted himself with distinction in differential equations, prob- ability, and what he called “social mathematics,” or quantitative political economy (notably an equitable system of voting). But at length he tired of his sequestered labor and set out toward the countryside. He made it as far as Clamart-le-Vignoble where he appeared in a tavern and, injured and famished, asked for an omelet made from a dozen eggs. The suspicious villagers seized and bound him and sent him to a prison in Bourg-la-Reine where, on the next morning, he was found dead in his cell. He left a wife and young daughter. Few times were as tumultuous as those of the French Revolution, and few people’s fate as sad as Condorcet’s. It might seem as if the times were unpropitious for scientific activity. Yet, as the novelist Denis Guedj contends in La mesure du monde (1987), the Revolution sustained, against all expectations, the successful execution of a triangulation across France, which served to define the standard meter. The Revolution, extended to Egypt, resulted in the first national inventory in the manner advocated by Francis Bacon, carried out under the Egyptian Institute Astrophysics and Space Science 290: 463–471, 2004. C  2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.