![]() ![]() In 1826 she published a paper in the prestigious Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, based on her experiments on a possible connection between violet light and electromagnetism. She went on to write two more science books – and a delightful memoir completed when she was 91 – but she was also a scientist in her own right. Which makes Mary Somerville all the more remarkable. In other words, ‘men of science’ was fact, not opinion. If Maxwell’s ‘men of science’ sounds sexist in hindsight, it is doubly important to remember that women were not allowed to join the academic academies – not even the Royal Society, whose aim was not so much the doing of science as promoting it. This was popular science rather than an advanced textbook, but Maxwell described it as “one of those suggestive books, which put into definite, intelligible, and communicable form the guiding ideas that are already working in the minds of men of science… but which they cannot yet shape into a definite statement.” This is high praise indeed. Father of the wireless electromagnetic era, he no doubt studied Mechanism of the Heavens as a student at Cambridge – and he certainly knew of Somerville’s second book, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. In celebrating the good news that Somerville is the people’s choice for the new gig, we could do worse than listen to the accolade given to her writing by one of the men she defeated in the public poll: James Clerk Maxwell. It is also a poignant irony that such a scholarly textbook – it was said that no more than five men in Britain were capable of writing it – had been written by a woman, but was used at a time when most universities in the world (including Cambridge) did not admit female students. This is a phenomenal achievement for a woman who taught herself science and mathematics. Her book on mathematical astronomy, Mechanism of the Heavens – published in 1831, when she was fifty years old – was used as an advanced textbook at Cambridge for a hundred years. ![]() ![]() From 2017, ten-pound notes issued by the Royal Bank of Scotland will feature a new face that of the great nineteenth-century science communicator Mary Somerville. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |