We can READ about the Sun

With old Sol threatening to vanish from Seattle skies until July, we can take some comfort in the fact that we’ll at least be able to read about our life-giving star. Bob Berman’s new book, The Sun’s Heartbeat: And Other Stories from the Life of the Star That Powers Our Planet (Little, Brown & Co., 2011), is here in the nick of time!

Berman is my favorite columnist in Astronomy magazine because of the wry humor he injects into his essays. The book is more of the same: twenty chapters of solid science written in a highly approachable and often humorous way. Even the chapter names are funny. Chapter 11 is titled, “The Sun Brings Death.” Chapter 12 then proclaims, “The Sun Can Save Your Life.” It’s not a contradiction.

The Sun’s Heartbeat is more than just the usual account of stellar formation and life cycle, though that’s all in there, too. Berman includes much about the history of solar science, including interesting tales about how the distance to the Sun was determined and how sunspots were figured out. By coincidence, I was reading the chapter on neutrinos just as the news broke last week that scientists in Switzerland had clocked some of these particles whizzing at faster than the speed of light, much to the chagrin of Einstein’s ghost. The jury is still out on that particular discovery and whether we have to discard the Theory of Relativity.

Berman devotes a good chunk of real estate in Heartbeat to anthropogenic climate forcing, climate change or global warming to most of us, and the Sun’s part in how hot or cool it is on Earth. There’s a great discussion of our current mania for protecting ourselves from all exposure to sunlight, and whether the resultant lack of vitamin D is contributing to maladies such as autism and causing more cancer than the sunblock prevents. It’s quite a dilemma for those of us fair-skinned, freckly, burn-don’t-tan types.

The book is at its most personal and engaging when Berman waxes poetic about his favorite sun-related phenomena. “Nothing outside of a birth or an IRS audit can produce such sobbing or reverential silence like a total solar eclipse or the fabled northern lights,” he writes. He describes beautifully the profound feelings of awe he’s had with every solar eclipse he’s seen, ever since his first in March of 1970 in Virginia Beach. It’s enough to get you to circle the dates now of the next total eclipses that will cross the U.S., on Aug. 21, 2017, and April 8, 2024. The former will be the first such event in the U.S. in 38 years.

The Sun’s Heartbeat is informative and entertaining. Give it a look!

Hindsight and Popular Astronomy a good read

For those interested in the history of astronomy, Dr. Alan Whiting’s book Hindsight and Popular Astronomy is an interesting read. Whiting’s premise is simple: let’s take a close look at nine books, aimed generally at a non-scientific audience, published between 1833 and 1944, and written by some of the giants of the science. Let’s see how well they stand up today, and where there are mistakes, see how they happened and how a lay reader might have seen them coming.

While our vision is pretty acute in hindsight, the book is hardy a “gotcha” tome. Whiting is careful to point out that the authors include some of the great thinkers of astronomy, from Sir John Herschel to Sir James Jeans. In fact, he says that most of what Herschel wrote, for example, would stand up well in astronomy texts today. But there were a few whoppers.

The books Whiting examines in Hindsight are:

• A Treatise on Astronomy, Sir John Herschel, 1833
• A Popular Astronomy, Sir George Biddell Airy, 1848
• Outlines Of Astronomy, 10th edition, Herschel, 1869
• Popular Astronomy, Simon Newcomb, 1878
• In the High Heavens, Sir Robert S. Ball, 1893
• Astronomy for Everybody, Newcomb, 1902
• The Universe Around Us, first edition, Sir James Jeans, 1929
• Stars And Atoms, third impression, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, 1928
• The Universe Around Us, fourth edition, Jeans, 1944

Each book gets its own chapter in Hindsight. Whiting sets the stage, explains the context in which the book was written, talks about what the author got right, then delves into what went wrong and why. While he leaves out the heavy math, he does sprinkle in a few chapters on basic astronomical observation and calculation, astrophysics, and quanta and relativity, just to get everyone, if not up to speed, exactly, then at least a bit conversant in the new topics the writers had to deal with.

Going back to Herschel’s Treatise on Astronomy, as noted Whiting says Sir John got most of it right, but made some major mistakes in his discussion of Saturn’s rings. Herschel noted that the rings were solid, that an eccentric ring would be stable, that the rings were observed to be eccentric, and that a periodic disturbance would stabilize an otherwise unstable ring. All of these statements are wrong. Whiting notes that the errors come variously from unexamined assumptions, relying on the work of others that contained mathematical errors, and trusting your eyes too much.

Throughout, sometimes even the greatest of the scientists fell into such bad habits of being most willing to believe that which supports his own theory.

While accessible, Hindsight and Popular Astronomy is not exactly a beach read. It’s a scholarly book that’s going make you stop often and think. It also makes me want to read some of the original works Whiting examines. Most are available, largely in reproduction format; the links above go to Amazon pages for such books. Skulking about the library or used book shops may be of some help as well.

Whiting is a professional astronomer and an Honorary Research Associate and Visiting Astronomer with the Astrophysics and Space Research Group at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. He’s also a member of the Seattle Astronomical Society, and can often be found on open house nights at the Theodor Jacobsen Observatory at the University of Washington, or sharing observing insights on Through the Clouds, the SAS Google group.