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“... Wonder,’ Descartes wrote, ‘is a sudden surprise of the soul,’ reserved for what is rare and extraordinary. In his classification, it is the first of the passions, the only one unaccompanied by fluttering pulse or pounding heart. Disinterested but not indifferent, wonder is a cool passion that fixes on objects for what they are, instead of what they are for us ...”

“... Is the Gross Domestic Product real? How about the unemployment rate? Or the population of the United Kingdom? These are entities that hover between the realms of the invented and the discovered. On the one hand, they are creatures of classification and calculation, of conventions of coding, modelling and sampling. It is the artifice of definition that makes them cohere – or unravel ...”

“... Objectivity’ is a word at once indispensable and elusive. It can be metaphysical, methodological and moral by turns, occasionally in the same paragraph. Sometimes it refers to the ultimate reality as seen from a God’s-eye point of view, sometimes to methods that replace judgments with algorithms, and sometimes to cool detachment from passions and interests ...”

“... On the morning of 30 April 1865, Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy, head of the British Meteorological Department, slit his throat. Because Fitzroy had been the captain of the Beagle, which several decades earlier had carried the young Charles Darwin around the world to conduct the research that eventually bore fruit in On the Origin of Species (1859), and because he was a devout evangelical, some historians have chalked up his suicide to guilt over his unwitting complicity in the genesis of a scientific theory he detested ...”

“... There has probably never been a society that did not erect barriers to certain kinds of knowledge. Moralists since Greek and Roman antiquity have frowned on busybodies who pry into their neighbours’ private lives; medieval Christian theologians condemned necromancers who wanted to discover the secrets of demons; today we fret about state surveillance of citizens and certain kinds of scientific research on human subjects ...”

“... The mirror, the map and the photograph have all at one time or another served as emblems of the yearning for a representation so faithful and so complete that it can’t be distinguished from what it represents. Of the three, the map might appear to be the odd one out: the mirror and the photo may be two-dimensional illusions of a three-dimensional reality, and both are notoriously prone to distortion, but they operate by optical mechanisms that apparently guarantee a slavish fidelity to what can be seen ...”

“... Among the icons of science, Newton is admired and Einstein revered, but Darwin is liked. This is rather puzzling on the face of it. His theories concerning organic evolution, and the satellite doctrines that have attached themselves to his name – Social Darwinisms of the political Right and Left, eugenics, robber-baron capitalism, anarchism, sociobiology – haven’t ceased to be controversial since the publication in 1859 of his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life ...”

“... On 28 January 1754, Horace Walpole coined a pretty bauble of a word in a letter to Horace Mann, apropos of a happy discovery made while browsing in an old book of Venetian heraldry: Mann had just sent him the Vasari portrait of the Grand Duchess Bianca Capello, and Walpole stumbled on the Capello coat of arms. He thought this accident to be no accident, but rather a special talent of his, ‘by which I find everything I want, à point nommé, wherever I dip for it ...”

“... Perhaps​ you too have planted a hydrangea in your garden, its blossom as blue as blue can be while still in its pot from the nursery, only to watch its colour muddy and turn ever pinker as the plant’s roots sink into alkaline soil. This is an example of the way the visible character of an organism can be modified by its immediate environment – in this case, soil pH ...”

“... Deep​ beneath the headquarters of the Linnean Society, in Burlington House on Piccadilly, is a bomb-proof room built at the height of the Cold War to protect the collections of the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné, more commonly known by his Latinised name, Linnaeus. Along with Linnaeus’s books and manuscripts, and his collections of insects and shells, the strongroom houses his herbarium of some fourteen thousand plant specimens, the basis for the Species plantarum of 1753 ...”

“... things and heterogeneous categories. The physical arrangement of the Wunderkammern, about which Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park write with great learning, was often calculated to heighten the sense of that heterogeneity, and the objects were typically chosen or fashioned to emphasise category confusion, to exemplify metamorphosis and to produce a ...”

“... the gap between understandings of wonder in Western Christianity and the Muslim East. As Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park have shown, from the 12th century well into the 18th, wonder was foundational to Western European thought. Drawing, at least initially, on the same Aristotelian tradition, scholars variously viewed wonder as a vehicle for ...”

“... your neighbours’ flat to inspect the paint colour in their kitchen, even if the door is open.Lorraine Daston’s book about the history of rules is as various as its subject is broad. It will tell you, with great wisdom and humour, about the regulation of traffic jams in 18th-century Paris, about early computers, about the historical emergence of ...”

“... Texts in this genre include Langdon Winner’s essay ‘Do Artefacts Have Politics?’ from 1980; Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s book Objectivity (2007); and the essay collection Standards and Their Stories (2009), edited by Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star. However you try to define the proxy, though, you’re soon faced with the overwhelming ...”

“... handbooks and tables had been produced for centuries. Around the time of the French Revolution, as Lorraine Daston has written, leading civil servants produced mammoth tables of logarithms and trigonometric functions calculated to 14 or more decimal places – far greater precision than any practical application would then have required. Gaspard Riche de ...”