Dava Sobel's Blog

As a child in first grade, I learned how to write my first full sentence, welcoming the new season. The command of words pleased me so much that after penciling “Fall is here” a dozen times or so on a lined sheet of paper in class, I used colored chalks to repeat it on the sidewalks around my parents’ house and even the bricks of the building. It became such a family code phrase that for the rest of his life my older brother Michael would call me every year near September 22 to remind me “Fall is here.” And sometimes I would mail him a note, in several colors of ink, to say the same.

I recently shared this memory with my science writing students at Smith College. Then I gave them a related assignment geared to their level: Write a one-paragraph explanation of the autumnal equinox. I knew this was tantamount to asking them to describe a spiral staircase without using their hands, but they met the challenge.

It feels fitting, at this time of year, to picture the tilted earth on its path through space, rounding a place in its orbit where sunlight falls evenly on the northern and southern hemispheres. The earth’s annual cycle–more ancient and enduring than the leaves’ consuming themselves in flame–moves all of us forward, on to face the next thing.

Fall is here.

Now that almost any factual question can be answered by googling the topic and ogling the results that pop on-screen within half a second, I usually find the information I need in a moment or two. But for a deeper kind of inquiry — seeking out the biographical details of a well known figure about whom little is known — I thought I might, for the first time, try riding the search engine all the way to the end of the line.

With no idea how far the trip through 82,300 results would carry me, or how long it might take, I just hopped on board at Wikipedia. Clicking along through the sites, enjoying the scenery of the available images, I reached the bottom of the first page in a few hours and paused for the night.

On Day 2 / Page 2 I discovered a Spanish-language video vignette dramatizing the life of my Scottish character, and vowed I would never again content myself with Google’s top most popular referrals. I got to the page bottom more quickly this time, and noticed that only the page numbers 1 through 10 were displayed there. Not until I had sped through the (repetitive) material on page 6, and prepared to click onward, did I detect the slight shift in destination. The page numbers now ranged from 2 to 11.  Progress through just one more page shifted the range again (3 to 12), but momentum or inertia kept me pressing on. From a vantage point at the top of page 29, the realization finally dawned that, with ten links proffered per page, I still had 8,202 pages to go. A question naturally arose that Google could not answer: If I persevere to the finish, will the effort prove worth my while?

By then, in addition to a pleasing number of useful discoveries, including my Scottish immigrant’s 1907 petition for American citizenship, I had also encountered a plethora of dead links, genealogies of unrelated people who shared her last (or even first) name, and careless repetitions of errors and apocryphal tales.

I quit there, of course. But I still find myself thinking down that long tunnel of possibilities, wondering what I’m missing.

This month I’m drawing up two required reading lists. One is for the students in the science-writing seminar I’ll start teaching in September at Smith College. It covers a wide range of subjects and genres, from the planet poems of Diane Ackerman to the DNA play by Paul Mullin, plus chapters from classic works such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, along with clips from The New York Times Tuesday science section and recent pieces in The New Yorker, New Scientist, and Scientific American.

The other reading list is for myself. It’s narrower in focus but much longer and will keep growing over the next two years as I research and write my current book, tentatively titled The Glass Universe, for Penguin Random House. The story takes place at the Harvard College Observatory, beginning in the 1870s, when Edward Pickering, the institution’s third director, approached some of the biggest questions in astronomy by hiring a large number of women to work as computers.

My reading list includes several histories of the American observatory — not just Harvard’s but also its contemporaries and competitors such as the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington (admirably chronicled by Steven J. Dick in Sky and Ocean Joined). Then there are the state-of-the-science accounts from a contemporary perspective, my favorite of which so far is Agnes Clerke’s Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century (Third Edition, 1893). I feel a kindred spirit-hood with Agnes, a once popular science writer whose colorful idiom describes “matter that thrills the ether into light.”

The best part of the reading awaits me in the Harvard University Archive, among the many boxes of letters to and from the former Observatory staffers. Much of their correspondence is available in digitized copies on-line, where I’ve gotten started going through it. ”Dear Edward,” the director’s brother addresses him from an astronomy outpost in Peru, then pours out twelve hand-written pages of news before signing off stiffly as “W. H. Pickering.” There’s a story there.

NASA’s New Horizons has traveled far enough in the seven years since its launch to see the target at the end of the trajectory. The spacecraft’s highest-resolution telescopic camera recently beamed back an image of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, discernible for the first time as two separate worlds.

Pluto and Charon: worlds apart

At least one announcement of this milestone referred to Pluto as a planet, re-igniting the debate over the definition of the “p” word and Pluto’s contested status as a member of that category.

Having played a (small) part in the Pluto affair, I would like to share some of the lessons in humility it taught me.

The first came from my older brother Michael, who, upon learning that the International Astronomical Union (IAU) had appointed me to its ”Planet Definition Committee,” asked, “Why do they want you?”

Maybe it was folly to try to redefine a term already laden with significance. A hand-me-down from the ancient Greek  planetai, meaning ”wanderers,” the word had referred of old to the Sun and Moon as well as to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Modern astronomers needed a more detailed, comprehensive definition, informed by new discoveries of the Solar System’s most distant objects plus several hundred “exoplanets” circling stars beyond the Sun. A strict definition, it was hoped, would also decide what to do about Pluto, whose planethood had come under question.

Our committee’s draft proposal in the summer of 2006 defined a planet as a body in orbit around a star, and massive enough to be globe-shaped. By our definition, Pluto remained a planet, while several other bodies became planets. These included the asteroid Ceres and a few so-called Kuiper Belt Objects beyond the orbit of Pluto. The census of Solar System planets thus rose to twelve — with a chance of climbing higher in the light of future discoveries.

Of all the objections raised against our suggestion, the one that surprised me most was the argument that children could not be expected to memorize an unlimited number of planet names.

When our proposal came to a vote at the IAU general assembly in Prague a few weeks later, another qualifier was added by some of the discussants: To be a planet, a round body orbiting a star had to dominate its neighborhood. This was Pluto’s downfall, as it orbits in thrall to the planet Neptune, and has failed to clear its path of other small fry.

The official definition reduced the Solar System to eight planets. Some outsiders thought Pluto had been bodily ejected, when in fact it was merely relegated to a separate class of “dwarf planet.” But unlike a dwarf star or a dwarf galaxy (each a diminutive version of its type), a dwarf planet is not a planet. This seems a harsh — even an illogical distinction. As one astronomer lamented, “Is a dachshund not a dog?”

An unfortunate change in the wording of the final definition replaced the word “star” with “the Sun.” This means that after years of (still unsettled) debate, we have defined only the worlds of our own Solar System, when a goal of the re-definition process had been the expansion of our vocabulary to embrace the myriad other worlds abounding throughout the galaxy.

Surely the definition needs retooling. Maybe by the time New Horizons arrives in 2015, Pluto will have morphed into a planet again.

For nine years now, I have served on a Rockefeller University committee that awards a more-or-less annual prize for science writing — not to a full-time reporter the likes of me, but to a distinguished researcher with a gift for unraveling science to a wide public audience: Jared Diamond, Oliver Sacks, Carl Sagan, and E. O. Wilson figure among the winners.

The prize went first to physician and poet Lewis Thomas, shortly before his death in 1993, and has been known ever since as the Lewis Thomas Prize. Dr. Thomas’s literary essays in The New England Journal of Medicine, collected in popular volumes such as The Lives of a Cell and Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony set a high standard for later honorees.

This past week, psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore became the first woman to receive the Lewis Thomas Prize. The award citation praised her book, Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, for changing minds in the medical community as well as the general public on the nature and stigma of mental illness.

A perk of serving on the selection committee is attending the winner’s invited lecture on the Rockefeller campus — a gated enclave for research and advanced education in the medical sciences, perched at the easternmost edge of mid-town Manhattan, where the current faculty includes six Nobel laureates.

Dr. Jamison opened herself to the audience at the start of her remarks by alluding to her own manic-depressive illness, or bi-polar disorder, which struck her at age seventeen. She stressed the importance of early diagnosis and treatment, since the condition worsens over time, and she credited lithium with an eight-fold reduction in the number of suicides attributable to manic depression.

Her other books include An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, in which she describes her own alternating episodes of suicidal depression and sleep-deprived mania. In addition to her teaching at Hopkins and clinical work in its Mood Disorders Center, she is currently writing a biography of American poet Robert Lowell, one of several manic-depressive artists she discusses in Touched With Fire.

Dr. Jamison saluted Lewis Thomas by letting him have the last words of her talk: “The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA,” he had written in The Lives of a Cell. “Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.”

The artist and architect Maya Lin invited me to her current show at the Pace Gallery because, she said, latitude and longitude were “playing a major part.”

Of course I went — not to the opening on April 25, but the following Tuesday afternoon, when it was possible to marvel quietly at the way Ms. Lin’s imagination gave substance to the globe’s lines of position. She had sculpted several of them in marble, the stuff of Earth’s own heft.  These works lay low on the wooden floor of the gallery, where I walked around them and stepped over them and enjoyed being disoriented by lines realized in three dimensions. Their smooth sides give rise to hummocky top surfaces suggesting everything from mountain ranges to mid-ocean ridges or even midtown skyscrapers.

The marble ring called “Latitude New York City” looked to be an excised, miniaturized parallel of the world, joining all the places that share the “41 North” address of this metropolis, from Pennsylvania cross-country to California and over the Pacific to Japan, North Korea, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal.

A pair of long, narrow pieces, “74 Degrees West Longitude” and “106 Degrees East Longitude,” were displayed end to end. The small gap between them kept east and west from meeting, though these particular meridians in fact intersect in Ms. Lin herself, a New Yorker with roots in China.

Maya Lin at one of her pin rivers. (The New York TImes)

On the gallery walls hung several bodies of water she had rendered in flows of silver. Other waterways, including the Hudson River and the flood surge of Hurricane Sandy, took shape in assemblies of several thousand steel pins painstakingly stuck into the plaster. The seeming permanence of these installations naturally raised the question of how one might purchase such a work of art for display elsewhere. The answer: The artist or her assistants could map the positions of the pins onto another site’s wall, drill all the tiny holes to hold them, and then insert them one by one.

The “Here and There” of the show’s title reflects the fact that only part of the exhibition resides in New York, where it can be seen through June 22, with the rest on view at Pace in London. I wish I were going to see that part as well.

In the top drawer of the file cabinet I inherited from my mother, I found an old manila folder full of letters that she and my father exchanged in the early phases of their romance, circa 1928 to 1930.

The little archive is a mix of missives, from folded notes on torn-out scraps of notebook paper that would pass as “texts” today to three-page rants on the tortures of separation during the summers they spent apart. These are the souvenirs my mother stored through sixty years of marriage and ten of widowhood. At the end, she neither gave nor willed them to me, but simply left them behind. After another decade, I have finally made time to read through and set them in chronological order.

My parents’ attitudes and personalities are fully recognizable in the pair of lovesick teenagers who wrote to each other at least once a day. Nothing they confided in their correspondence seems foreign to me or even to my children, who knew the couple only as elderly grandparents. What feels strange is to hold the fossil record of their love preserved in the amber of the writing paper — not just the words, but also the moody changes of handwriting, the stationery she acknowledged as a gift from him (in their favorite color), the antiquated letterhead of the laboratory where he worked, the lost quiet of a private intimacy at the furthest possible remove from the social network.

A handsome new, illustrated edition of Galileo’s great Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World will be published in June, and I was invited to write an introduction.

Frontispiece from Galileo's Dialogue, originally published in 1632.

Of course I accepted. I like introducing other people’s books. It’s something I’ve done perhaps half a dozen times in my life, though never for anyone so revered or so long dead. Yesterday (February 15) was Galileo’s 449th birthday; January 8 marked the 371st anniversary of his death.

The Dialogue — or Dialogo in the original Italian — is nearing four hundred years in print. Having spent its first two centuries in a state of suspended animation on the Index of Prohibited Books, it remains evergreen. A reviewer’s note in the mid-February 2013 double issue of The New Yorker called Galileo’s Dialogue “the most entertaining classic of science ever published.”

Others have shared that opinion, including Albert Einstein, who wrote the Foreword for the 1953 English translation by the late Stillman Drake. Einstein judged the Dialogue “a downright roguish attempt” to pretend obedience to authority while in fact flouting it: “A man is here revealed who possesses the passionate will, the intelligence, and the courage to stand up as the representative of rational thinking against the host of those who, relying on the ignorance of the people and the indolence of teachers in priest’s and scholar’s garb, maintain and defend their positions of authority.”

Re-reading the Dialogue and retracing its tragic history for my current assignment, I reflected that I will never be asked to perform a similar service for Copernicus. Unlike Galileo, who functioned as the Carl Sagan of his day, Copernicus spoke to a small community of intellectuals who could read Latin and follow his math. Although his book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, inspired Galileo and fomented a scientific revolution, one could never call it a page-turner.

No, not marriage. But something very like, for a person in my profession, given the time commitment implied. I’m trying to describe the scope of a new book idea — a project that could consume my life for at least five years — to a potential publisher.

The point of the book proposal is to awaken the publisher’s interest, elicit a promise of publication, and secure an “advance” sufficient to cover research and living expenses for as long as it takes to write the text. (“Advance” is short for “advance against royalties,” which means that the dollar amount advanced to the author at the outset must be repaid to the publisher from book sales before the author can receive any further income.)

The challenge of writing a good proposal is to frame the story and make its significance come real before conducting the several years’ worth of research required to tell it in full book-length detail. I’m talking about nonfiction. Novelists don’t write proposals. They need to write entire novels before publishers will pay attention.

In preparation for this proposal, I have read a dozen books, toured the Web via “Google Scholar,” interviewed a few people, and made one preliminary visit to the Harvard University Observatory, where the action takes place. I’ve also talked up the gist of the idea in conversation so often that the characters already feel familiar. I like them a lot, which is good, because if things go well I’m going to be living with them for the foreseeable future.

How long should a proposal be? “As long as it needs to be,” is the general rule. I wrote a fifteen-page version in the summer that fell short for several reasons. Friends and family members who read it failed to grasp the nature of the work the characters were doing, or get a good sense of who they were, or how the astronomy of that period (late 1800s to early 1900s) fit into the larger picture of American society. When I say my preliminary readers failed to understand, I mean I failed to explain.

Now I have thirty pages. The proposal is much stronger, but not just because it’s longer. The months I spent thinking about it helped me find the story line, whereas before I was sketching a series of situations. As my agent, Michael Carlisle, reminded me when he urged putting aside the proposal for a while, “Sometimes writing is about not writing.”

I’d been thinking, en route in early November to Australia for my eighth total solar eclipse, that I’d spent more than enough time and money chasing the shadow of the moon. I figured I’d give up the quest after this one last exposure.

But then the weather on Green Island cleared, after a string of gloomy mornings, to reveal the sunrise eclipse.

Four out of six umbraphiles captured, including photographer KC Cole, whose own shadow fills the foreground.

I watched from a waterside helipad with five friends, four of whom had never seen an eclipse before. Their first-timers’ anticipation upped my own excitement, especially when I realized I would need to seize the right moment for them to remove their protective glasses and stare naked-eyed at totality. I’d never been in that position of responsibility before.

Now. Take off the glasses. Oh my God. There’s the diamond ring!

The sight, familiar but ever foreign, framed the black circle of the eclipsed Sun in a halo of silver and red. The whole world around us — sky, sand, sea — changed color, and the air grew colder. Clouds along the horizon threatened to blot out the spectacle at any moment. Instead they only skirted the Sun, as though to remind us how lucky we were — how close we had come, thousands of miles from home, to seeing nothing.

I felt perfectly happy for the whole two minutes — for the fleeting two minutes — that totality lasted. When it ended too soon, as it always does, the euphoria hung on for days. And now of course I’m scheming for the means to view upcoming exotic eclipses in Africa and the Arctic, until August 21, 2017, when the path of a total solar eclipse will traverse the United States, cutting a diagonal swath from Oregon to South Carolina. It’s not too early to start considering the ideal perch.