Dava Sobel finds lyricism in science with her ‘Planets’ tour
The Oregonian, October 23, 2005
With “The Planets,” Dava Sobel, the best-selling author of “Galileo’s Daughter,” continues her reign as one of the most engaging and lyrical science writers around. She manages to warp time, space and genre to bring into focus the rockiest outcroppings of our solar system.
By using a surprisingly harmonious combination of personal reflection, hard science, history, fictive letter-writing and poetry, Sobel sheds new light on those familiar orbs in the night sky. She opens with a personal essay about her childhood days of backyard stargazing, dioramas of the solar system and a school play in which she played a “Lonely Star” (the sun), pining for companionship.
The sun gets its own chapter in “The Planets.” Titled “Genesis,” this essay elegantly interweaves the biblical story of creation with the scientific big-bang theory. Sobel manages to wonder about the origins of the solar system without alienating either those whose faith lies in God or science:
“Is it an accident that the solar system’s sole inhabited planet possesses the only satellite [the moon] precisely sized to create the spectacle of a total solar eclipse? Or is this startling manifestation of the sun’s hidden splendor part of a divine design?”
Sobel then nimbly jumps back in religious time and outward millions of miles to consider Mercury, the planet and the Greek messenger god. We learn that the planet's activities on the horizon—the only place it is visible to the naked eye—mirror the god’s attributes, or vice versa. Welcoming the dawn or bidding adieu to the day, Mercury the planet is, like the god, a guide between worlds.
Sobel then traces the evolving discoveries about Mercury the planet, from Ptolemy’s second-century assertion that Mercury orbited the stationary Earth to the 1974 Mariner 10 spacecraft mission to photograph the crater-ridden planet. Readers begin to get an inkling of how persistent and insatiable curiosity about the solar system is for scientists, philosophers and artists. Certainly that was true for 20th-century English composer Gustav Holst, who “created the only known example of a symphonic tribute to the solar system.” Sobel uses Holst’s symphony as an entryway to examining the relation between music and astronomy, specifically the resonances of Saturn’s famous rings. She writes that the gaps between Saturn’s rings result “from the interplay of Saturn’s satellites with particles in the rings, following the same rules Pythagoras defined in his experiments with strings.”
Part of what brings Sobel’s subject matter alive, so to speak, is her knack for creating a cast of characters who have contributed to astronomy throughout the ages. Names like Kepler, Galileo and Halley will be familiar to many readers, but it is good to be reminded of, or perhaps introduced to, Maria Mitchell, who discovered her eponymous comet in 1847. Or Clyde Tombaugh, an “upstanding, hardworking, unimpeachably decent young man” from Kansas who discovered Pluto in 1930. Similarly, in case your English Lit class notes are molding in the attic, Sobel quotes from eight writers who have written odes to the planet Venus, including Wordsworth, Tennyson and Frost.
I read “The Planets” during the space shuttle Discovery’s recent successful return to Earth, a welcome bit of news amid depressing reports of war, murders and natural disasters. It occurred to me that perhaps astronomy—and its cousins astrology, mythology and science fiction—has often served this purpose: To inspire the human mind with something more lofty, adventurous and enlightening than our baser instincts and problems. But then, I’m a dreamer, and I suppose that’s what stargazing is for as well.
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