The Sun Kings - Stuart Clark

   2007; 189 pages.  Full Title: The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Astronomy; Non-Fiction; Science History; Biographies.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    Let’s see if you’re as resourceful as an astronomer named William Herschel.

 

    The year is 1801.  Herschel is already well-known in his field for all sorts of discoveries using his state-of-the-art telescopes, including the planet Uranus.  However, he’s now investigating sunspots, using an indirect method that avoids staring directly into the Sun and burning one’s eyes out.

 

    Herschel finds that sunspots vary in number and intensity over time.  What effect does that have on Earth’s weather?  When there’s a period of time where there are no sunspots, will the Earth be warmer than normal, cooler, or stormier?

 

    Watching sunspots is nothing new.  Astronomers have been doing that since Galileo invented the telescope, back in the 1600s.  A number of “low sunspot periods” have been chronicled since 1650, lasting anywhere from 2 to 20 years each.

 

    Unfortunately, nobody’s been recording the daily temperatures throughout the world yet, so how can Herschel correlate global weather conditions for the past century-and-a-half with sunspot activity?  Can you figure out a way?

 

    The answer is given at the end of this review.

 

What’s To Like...

    The Sun Kings is an ambitious half-&-half blend of biography and astronomy genres.  It covers the time span of 1795 to the present, with most of the focus on the 19th century.  The Richard Carrington mentioned in the subtitle is the main biographical subject, but other astronomers share some time in the spotlight too, including William Herschel, his son John Herschel, Edward Walter Maunder, and the enthusiastic but eccentric Elias Loomis cited below.

 

    Mixing details of the astronomers’ personal lives with their scientific endeavors seems a bit risky, but Stuart Clark makes it work remarkably well.  The main focus of the book is of course scientists trying to understand the workings of the Sun, but Richard Carrington’s personal life had some noteworthy (and sometimes sordid) moments, and Britain’s astronomical community quite often sinks into some down-and-dirty politics.

 

    Fifteen photographs are included in the book, most of them from the 19^th century and all of them interesting.  My favorite was astronomer Warren de la Rue’s 1860 "photoheliograph" of the sun totally eclipsed, showing multiple solar flares and slight depressions in the Sun’s horizon.  It’s absolutely fascinating.  There are also footnotes, usually giving anecdotal sidelights to something and conveniently placed at the bottom of the page, and well worth taking time to read.  One example is given in the second excerpt below.

 

    Sciency topics abound, many of which were new to me.  I was familiar with things like St. Elmo’s Fire, and how electrons were "found".  But it was enlightening to read about Ceres and Pallas being discovered; what Baily’s Beads are;  the probable causes of Europe’s “Little Ice Age”; and the havoc-wreaking appearance of the 2003 “Halloween Flares”.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.7/5 based on 79 ratings and 51 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.15/5 based on 176 ratings and 31 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    One of Loomis’s early attempts at meteorology was to estimate tornado wind speeds in a rather macabre way.  A persistent prairie story was that chickens unlucky enough to be caught in tornados were often stripped of their feathers.  In 1842, Loomis chose several even unluckier chickens for his experiment.  He killed them and fired each carcass from a cannon.  His plan was to use different explosive charges so that each chicken would be propelled at a different velocity, then to examine each to see which had been stripped and which had remained feathered.  Things did not go quite according to plan.  He wrote, “My conclusions are that a chicken forced through the air with this velocity is torn entirely to pieces, so tornadoes likely possess wind speeds of less than the measured chicken speed of 341 miles per hour.”  (pg. 83)

 

    On 27 December 2004, the largest burst of gamma rays ever recorded cut through the solar system.  Smothered in the radiation, satellites instantly began transmitting alert messages to their masters on Earth.  As the torrent swept past our planet, part of it bounced off the Moon, and struck Earth again.  When astronomers triangulated the blast they found that it came not from the Sun but from deep space.  Tracing the blast backward, they found just one celestial object from which it could have originated: the supposed dead heart of a star, just twenty kilometers in diameter and lying some 50,000 light-years away.  (pg. 188)

 

Something strange had taken place on 1 September.  Something that had made the Earth’s natural cloak of magnetism quake.  (pg. 19)

    I can’t think of anything to gripe about in The Sun Kings.  I don’t recall any cusswords, but that’s to be expected for a scientific tome.  The text is only 189 pages long, but there were enough scientific topics discussed to where I wouldn’t call this a fast read.

 

    The Sun Kings fills a knowledge gap between the early days of the telescope (thank you, Galileo) and modern astronomy, where we now can view the universe from observatories orbiting in space.  The book also puts to rest any fears that Astronomy is a dead science in which everything “out there” has already been discovered and figured out.  As detailed in the second excerpt above, our Universe still has lots of surprises for anyone poking telescopes, cameras, and/or other monitoring devices at it.

 

    9½ Stars.  Here’s Herschel’s mind-boggling solution to the sunspot/weather correlation issue.  In his time, no one was recording daily temperature highs throughout the world.  But the yearly global market prices of wheat were available, because Adam Smith had listed them in his famous book The Wealth of Nations.

 

    Herschel reasoned that a high price of wheat indicated a meager crop that year, implying poor growing conditions.  He found that when sunspots were more numerous, wheat prices were generally lower, indicating the harvests were more bountiful.  Ergo, sunspots are good for Earth’s weather patterns, depressing the sun's heat and giving us calmer weather.  Sheer genius!