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 19th 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!
