Skip to main content

The Women of the Moon - Daniel Altschuler and Fernando Ballesteros ****

At the time this book was written, there were 1,586 craters on the Moon that had been named after scientists and philosophers - but only 28 of these were women. The idea, then, was to use this linking theme to provide short biographies of each  of the 28 women, along with a picture of their crater. Like all high concept books, there's a danger that the idea might be stronger than the actual content - after all, by biography number 28, the reader might be feeling a little dazed - but I'm really glad I gave it a try.

After a tweely titled 'Pretext', the book gives us a solid introduction to where the Moon came from, its craters and a brief history of lunar astronomy. This is written with a light touch and works at just the right level of detail. We then get onto our 28 mini-biographies. Inevitably, some of the individuals well-known. So we get names like Marie Curie, Caroline Herschel, Mary Somerville, Annie Cannon, Henrietta Leavitt, Lise Meitner and Emmy Noether - along with the four female astronauts who died in the shuttle disasters. But what's most interesting is the less familiar women.

Certainly for me, names such as Nicole-Reine de la Briere Lepaute, Anne Sheepshanks, Catherine Bruce, Mary Blagg and others were totally unknown. I was particularly fascinated by Blagg who did her astronomical work not at some great observatory, but in Cheadle in Cheshire. The range of figures was impressive - from the classical Hypatia (and rather bizarrely St Catherine, who the authors suggest might be the same person) to the Harvard calculators, from scientific benefactors to Nobel Prize winners. I'll be honest, by the end I was flagging a little and skipped some of the subjects I already knew well, but the rest were excellent.

There were a few small issues. It's disappointing that an Oxford University Press book should be written in US English, use American domestic units of measurement and refer to 'Cambridge, England' to distinguish it from the 'real' Cambridge in Massachusetts. Sometimes I felt that the history didn't provide the kind of explanation of uncertainty I'd expect from good science writing - for instance, we were told as if it were fact that the Library at Alexandra held almost a million volumes, but as far as I'm aware, the catalogue is lost and current best estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 books. There were also some editing issues. The word 'Earth', referring to the planet, for example, was inconsistently capitalised. More significantly, this was a translation and doesn't seem to have been properly edited in English as, for example, Maskelyne is given the job title 'royal astronomer' rather than 'astronomer royal' and Herschel is said to have moved nearer 'Windsor palace' rather than 'Windsor Castle'.

Apparently in the five years since the book was first written, another three women have had craters named after them. The authors mention a hope to update the book - but I think any more biographies would be in danger of turning Women of the Moon into a reference volume - I'd much rather it stayed as it is, a readable and enjoyable title.
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more