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:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...
Post a Comment
Read more

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...
Post a Comment
Read more