Burlington Public Library MA

Dante and the early astronomer, science, adventure, and a Victorian woman who opened the heavens, Tracy Daugherty

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

contains biographical information

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Dante and the early astronomer

bibliography

1053572057

Tracy Daugherty

science, adventure, and a Victorian woman who opened the heavens

In 1910, Mary Acworth Evershed (1867-1949) sat on a hill in southern India staring at the moon as she grappled with apparent mistakes in Dante's Divine Comedy. Was Dante's astronomy unintelligible? Or was he, for a man of his time and place, as insightful as one could be about the sky? As the twentieth century began, women who wished to become professional astronomers faced difficult cultural barriers, but Evershed joined the British Astronomical Association and, from an Indian observatory, became an experienced observer of sunspots, solar eclipses, and variable stars. From the perspective of one remarkable amateur astronomer, readers will see how ideas developed during Galileo's time evolved or were discarded in Newtonian conceptions of the cosmos and recast in Einstein's theories. The result is a book about the history of science but also a poetic meditation on literature, science, and the evolution of ideas

Preface: The dawn-light of Ravenna -- On the hilltop -- To the lighthouse -- The city of stars -- Poetry and sunspots -- "Black star-lore" -- Physical astronomy -- Romantics -- Prisms -- The notebook of the sun -- The gift of the forest -- The scarcity of wasps in Kashmir -- Harmonic structures -- "Dante and the early astronomers" -- Sun-chasers -- Exploding the sun -- Saturnalia -- Infinity and the fly -- Wallal -- Departure -- Who's who in the moon -- The Maunder minimum -- The remade universe -- Return to origins -- Northern lights -- Epilogue: Kodai dusk