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The Solar System and Back
Vintage paperback
253 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published January 1, 1972
3 people are currently reading
116 people want to read
About the author
Isaac Asimov
4,341 books27.7k followersWorks of prolific Russian-American writer Isaac Asimov include popular explanations of scientific principles,
The Foundation Trilogy
(1951-1953), and other volumes of fiction.
Isaac Asimov, a professor of biochemistry, wrote as a highly successful author, best known for his books.
Asimov, professor, generally considered of all time, edited more than five hundred books and ninety thousand letters and postcards. He published in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey decimal classification but lacked only an entry in the category of philosophy (100).
People widely considered Asimov, a master of the genre alongside Robert Anson Heinlein and Arthur Charles Clarke as the "big three" during his lifetime. He later tied Galactic Empire and the Robot into the same universe as his most famous series to create a unified "future history" for his stories much like those that Heinlein pioneered and Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson previously produced. He penned "Nightfall," voted in 1964 as the best short story of all time; many persons still honor this title. He also produced well mysteries, fantasy, and a great quantity of nonfiction. Asimov used Paul French, the pen name, for the Lucky Starr, series of juvenile novels.
Most books of Asimov in a historical way go as far back to a time with possible question or concept at its simplest stage. He often provides and mentions well nationalities, birth, and death dates for persons and etymologies and pronunciation guides for technical terms. Guide to Science, the tripartite set Understanding Physics, and Chronology of Science and Discovery exemplify these books.
Asimov, a long-time member, reluctantly served as vice president of Mensa international and described some members of that organization as "brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs." He took more pleasure as president of the humanist association. The asteroid 5020 Asimov, the magazine Asimov's Science Fiction, an elementary school in Brooklyn in New York, and two different awards honor his name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_As...
Isaac Asimov, a professor of biochemistry, wrote as a highly successful author, best known for his books.
Asimov, professor, generally considered of all time, edited more than five hundred books and ninety thousand letters and postcards. He published in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey decimal classification but lacked only an entry in the category of philosophy (100).
People widely considered Asimov, a master of the genre alongside Robert Anson Heinlein and Arthur Charles Clarke as the "big three" during his lifetime. He later tied Galactic Empire and the Robot into the same universe as his most famous series to create a unified "future history" for his stories much like those that Heinlein pioneered and Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson previously produced. He penned "Nightfall," voted in 1964 as the best short story of all time; many persons still honor this title. He also produced well mysteries, fantasy, and a great quantity of nonfiction. Asimov used Paul French, the pen name, for the Lucky Starr, series of juvenile novels.
Most books of Asimov in a historical way go as far back to a time with possible question or concept at its simplest stage. He often provides and mentions well nationalities, birth, and death dates for persons and etymologies and pronunciation guides for technical terms. Guide to Science, the tripartite set Understanding Physics, and Chronology of Science and Discovery exemplify these books.
Asimov, a long-time member, reluctantly served as vice president of Mensa international and described some members of that organization as "brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs." He took more pleasure as president of the humanist association. The asteroid 5020 Asimov, the magazine Asimov's Science Fiction, an elementary school in Brooklyn in New York, and two different awards honor his name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_As...
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 2, 2018
My perspective on this title is necessarily highly personal; I first read it when I was about eleven years old.
This humble collection of science essays, originally published in the monthly Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, sparked what has been a lifelong enthusiasm in me for a particular form of popular science writing. Asimov's authorial voice is conversational and amusing in its self-effacingly egotistical style. That voice, however, takes a back seat to his lucid explanations of scientific phenomena, and, moreover, his unabashed love for the scientific process. I have read, in other reviews over the years, frustration with Asimov on the part of some readers, since the Good Doctor insistently injects brief biographical profiles about scientists, physicians, ancient philosophers, et al. into his essays.
I don't regard such material as mere filler. This information goes a long way towards leavening what Asimov also shares: short tables of empirical data, be they properties of chemical elements or orbital eccentricities of planets. When collecting his essays for hardback and subsequent paperback publication, Asimov often had to revise his essays, particularly the astronomical ones, in light of facts revealed by space probes and new research. Consequently, footnotes reflecting the evolving state of scientific knowledge pop up from time to time.
In retrospect, I can see how Asimov's approach, whether he intended it thus or not, imbued me with a philosophy of science that has served me well. First and foremost, science is a human endeavor, undertaken by fallible beings with finite capacities for observation, insight, and judgment. Then, too, sometimes they are motivated by baser considerations than the pursuit of truth--but the processes of peer review and fundamental dedication to reproducible results have evolved to uphold the integrity of scientific endeavor. Secondly, we are never, ever done learning about the universe around us. We make our best guesses with the information we have available, but have to be prepared to revise or even abandon our present understanding if we are presented with better-grounded facts or a theory with more explanatory vigor.
Unknowingly inculcated with these values from a young age, I had come to take them for granted and have been surprised many times over the years at just how differently people--usually people with little or no university training in the sciences--view the scientific method. Not fully grasping this, I have blundered into many vitriolic and unsatisfying arguments with opponents from Creationists to folks who use great books like Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as a license for irrational skepticism (rational skepticism, by contrast, is essential to science and, I submit, good thinking in general).
Not to hammer home the point, but I have come to think that religious fundamentalists, for all they spout and blow about humility, exhibit precious little grasp of the concept. They "know", regardless of what they may ever experience in their lives, that the universe has an Intelligent Designer, among other unfalsifiable propositions. Yet it is scientists and other rational folks--at their best--who exhibit humility before the phenomena before them. If our mental model doesn't work to explain what we observe, it is our model that must yield, not our observations.
Asimov of course does not pontificate about these matters, at least not in this work. It's there, deeply between the lines, of his effervescent prose.
What did Dr. Asimov turn his typewriter to in this anthology? For most of these I will simply list key concepts and personalities discussed.
* Introduction, "Nothing" (March 1959): an article on the hardness of vaccums (from those created in the laboratory to interplanetary, interstellar, and intergalactic space), which Asimov had had to retire due to evidence against its accuracy, and then got to un-retire when, nine years later, newer observations restored its plausibility after all. Without ever explicitly saying so, Asimov offers us a cautionary tale against trusting in the finality of our conclusions.
Part I--The Solar System
Section A: The Inner System
Chapter 1: "The Seventh Planet" (March 1968): a history of astronomical observations of Venus and Mercury, their rotational periods, superior and inferior conjunction, brightness, elongation, Copernicus, Galileo
Chapter 2: "The Dance of the Sun" (April 1968): Mercury, orbital rotation vs. revolution, Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli. Includes a very neat description of what the Sun's movement across the sky would look like to an observer on the surface of Mercury--the Sun does not simply rise at one horizon, proceed steadily across the sky, and then set on the other horizon as it does on Earth (at non-polar latitudes).
Chapter 3: "Backward, Turn Backward--" (May 1968): orbital tipping, axial tipping, retrograde motion
Chapter 4: "Little Lost Satellite" (July 1968): the asteroids Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta
Section B: The Outer System
Chapter 5: "Little Found Satellite" (October 1968): Saturn's rings, its satellites (Titan, Iapteus, Rhea, Dione, Tethys, Mimas, Enceladus, Hyperion, Phoebe, Janus), Galileo, Christian Huygens, Dominique Cassini, William Herschel, William Cranch Bond, George Philips Bond, James Clerk Maxwell, James Edward Keeler, Edouard Roche, Roche's Limit, William Henry Pickering, Andouin Dollfus
Note: in the foregoing essay, on p. 80, Asimov states "There was simply nothing like Saturn's ring in the heavens, and there still isn't." (emphasis in original) Of course we now know that all of the gas giants have ring systems, though Saturn's is the most elaborate and most easily observed from Earth's surface.
Chapter 6: "View from Amalthea" (December 1968): Jupiter's satellites. This is probably the most evocative essay in the book for me. In it, Asimov uses data about Jupiter's Galilean moons (and the dwarf satellite, Amelthea) to work out what the Amalthean sky would look like. It's this kind of writing that kindles one's enthusiam for manned space travel. More than one Asimov essay calcuates how many seconds (or minutes, or degrees) of arc various astronomical bodies would take up in the sky of another body, and I find it to be an effective technique.
Chapter 7: "The Dance of the Satellites" (January 1969): a further exploration of topics in the previous essay
Chapter 8: "The Planetary Eccentric" (November 1968): rotational and revolutionary periods, Pluto, Percival Lowell, "Planet X", Clyde W. Tombaugh, an explanation of orbital eccentricity, perihelion, aphelion, Gerard P. Kuiper, Neptune, Ian Halliday, Triton
Part II--And Back
Section A: Physics
Chapter 9: "Just Right" (February 1969): "infantile science fiction", the square-cube law
The foregoing essay should be required reading for everyone who might watch an old SF movie or play a fantasy- or SF-based role-playing game.
Chapter 10: "The Incredible Shrinking People" (March 1968): a recitation of Asimov's struggles novelizing the film Fantastic Voyage in light of the horrendous scientific illiteracy of the screenplay; a nearly essential companion to the previous essay, and notable for its coverage of elements of human anatomy and physiology at the microscopic level
Section B: Chemistry
Chapter 11: "The First Metal" (December 1967): the metals known to the ancients (iron, copper, lead, tin, mercury, gold)
Chapter 12: "The Seventh Metal" (January 1968): mercury
Chapter 13: "The Predicted Metal" (February 1968): gallium, the development of periodic theory, John Alexander Reina Newlands, Mendeleev
Asimov nearly always began his science essays with a personal anecdote which he tied in, with greater or lesser plausibility, to the topic of his essay. This one has a sentence which, for reasons I don't fully understand, has stuck with me through the years...
"For example, there is the man who laughed at John Alexander Reina Newlands, and I would gladly point the finger of scorn at him if I only knew his name."
(Evidently, by the time Asimov wrote his Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, he had learned that the foremost of Newlands's mockers was a physics professor named George Carey Foster.)
Section C: Biology
Chapter 14: "The Terrible Lizards" (August 1968): a survey of the taxonomic classifications of dinosaurs
In this piece Asimov introduces Sir Richard Owen, a "scientific villain" who used dishonorable methods in attacking Darwin's Origin of Species, such as writing anonymous reviews praising his own work in multiple outlets. Nevertheless, Asimov concedes, "that can't be allowed to obscure the fact that he made important contributions to biology." He then proceeds to enumerate those contributions.
Chapter 15: "The Dying Lizards" (September 1968): mass extinctions and speculations on their causes
Chapter 16: "Counting Chromosomes" (June 1968): human chromosomes, trisomy-21, Down's Syndrome, sex chromosomes and aberrations thereof
Chapter 17: "Uncertain, Coy, and Hard to Please" (April 1969): sex roles, anthropology
(All essays are from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.)
Oddly enough, despite being an admirer of the Good Doctor for over twenty years, I've never read any of Asimov's Foundation, Galactic Empire, or Robots novels. That's right, not a single one--though I have read quite a few of his short stories and some of his later novels. There will be time, I think, for the works that made him famous and which everyone else thinks of when I effuse about Asimov. In the meantime, I have more of his science essays to read...
This humble collection of science essays, originally published in the monthly Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, sparked what has been a lifelong enthusiasm in me for a particular form of popular science writing. Asimov's authorial voice is conversational and amusing in its self-effacingly egotistical style. That voice, however, takes a back seat to his lucid explanations of scientific phenomena, and, moreover, his unabashed love for the scientific process. I have read, in other reviews over the years, frustration with Asimov on the part of some readers, since the Good Doctor insistently injects brief biographical profiles about scientists, physicians, ancient philosophers, et al. into his essays.
I don't regard such material as mere filler. This information goes a long way towards leavening what Asimov also shares: short tables of empirical data, be they properties of chemical elements or orbital eccentricities of planets. When collecting his essays for hardback and subsequent paperback publication, Asimov often had to revise his essays, particularly the astronomical ones, in light of facts revealed by space probes and new research. Consequently, footnotes reflecting the evolving state of scientific knowledge pop up from time to time.
In retrospect, I can see how Asimov's approach, whether he intended it thus or not, imbued me with a philosophy of science that has served me well. First and foremost, science is a human endeavor, undertaken by fallible beings with finite capacities for observation, insight, and judgment. Then, too, sometimes they are motivated by baser considerations than the pursuit of truth--but the processes of peer review and fundamental dedication to reproducible results have evolved to uphold the integrity of scientific endeavor. Secondly, we are never, ever done learning about the universe around us. We make our best guesses with the information we have available, but have to be prepared to revise or even abandon our present understanding if we are presented with better-grounded facts or a theory with more explanatory vigor.
Unknowingly inculcated with these values from a young age, I had come to take them for granted and have been surprised many times over the years at just how differently people--usually people with little or no university training in the sciences--view the scientific method. Not fully grasping this, I have blundered into many vitriolic and unsatisfying arguments with opponents from Creationists to folks who use great books like Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as a license for irrational skepticism (rational skepticism, by contrast, is essential to science and, I submit, good thinking in general).
Not to hammer home the point, but I have come to think that religious fundamentalists, for all they spout and blow about humility, exhibit precious little grasp of the concept. They "know", regardless of what they may ever experience in their lives, that the universe has an Intelligent Designer, among other unfalsifiable propositions. Yet it is scientists and other rational folks--at their best--who exhibit humility before the phenomena before them. If our mental model doesn't work to explain what we observe, it is our model that must yield, not our observations.
Asimov of course does not pontificate about these matters, at least not in this work. It's there, deeply between the lines, of his effervescent prose.
What did Dr. Asimov turn his typewriter to in this anthology? For most of these I will simply list key concepts and personalities discussed.
* Introduction, "Nothing" (March 1959): an article on the hardness of vaccums (from those created in the laboratory to interplanetary, interstellar, and intergalactic space), which Asimov had had to retire due to evidence against its accuracy, and then got to un-retire when, nine years later, newer observations restored its plausibility after all. Without ever explicitly saying so, Asimov offers us a cautionary tale against trusting in the finality of our conclusions.
Part I--The Solar System
Section A: The Inner System
Chapter 1: "The Seventh Planet" (March 1968): a history of astronomical observations of Venus and Mercury, their rotational periods, superior and inferior conjunction, brightness, elongation, Copernicus, Galileo
Chapter 2: "The Dance of the Sun" (April 1968): Mercury, orbital rotation vs. revolution, Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli. Includes a very neat description of what the Sun's movement across the sky would look like to an observer on the surface of Mercury--the Sun does not simply rise at one horizon, proceed steadily across the sky, and then set on the other horizon as it does on Earth (at non-polar latitudes).
Chapter 3: "Backward, Turn Backward--" (May 1968): orbital tipping, axial tipping, retrograde motion
Chapter 4: "Little Lost Satellite" (July 1968): the asteroids Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta
Section B: The Outer System
Chapter 5: "Little Found Satellite" (October 1968): Saturn's rings, its satellites (Titan, Iapteus, Rhea, Dione, Tethys, Mimas, Enceladus, Hyperion, Phoebe, Janus), Galileo, Christian Huygens, Dominique Cassini, William Herschel, William Cranch Bond, George Philips Bond, James Clerk Maxwell, James Edward Keeler, Edouard Roche, Roche's Limit, William Henry Pickering, Andouin Dollfus
Note: in the foregoing essay, on p. 80, Asimov states "There was simply nothing like Saturn's ring in the heavens, and there still isn't." (emphasis in original) Of course we now know that all of the gas giants have ring systems, though Saturn's is the most elaborate and most easily observed from Earth's surface.
Chapter 6: "View from Amalthea" (December 1968): Jupiter's satellites. This is probably the most evocative essay in the book for me. In it, Asimov uses data about Jupiter's Galilean moons (and the dwarf satellite, Amelthea) to work out what the Amalthean sky would look like. It's this kind of writing that kindles one's enthusiam for manned space travel. More than one Asimov essay calcuates how many seconds (or minutes, or degrees) of arc various astronomical bodies would take up in the sky of another body, and I find it to be an effective technique.
Chapter 7: "The Dance of the Satellites" (January 1969): a further exploration of topics in the previous essay
Chapter 8: "The Planetary Eccentric" (November 1968): rotational and revolutionary periods, Pluto, Percival Lowell, "Planet X", Clyde W. Tombaugh, an explanation of orbital eccentricity, perihelion, aphelion, Gerard P. Kuiper, Neptune, Ian Halliday, Triton
Part II--And Back
Section A: Physics
Chapter 9: "Just Right" (February 1969): "infantile science fiction", the square-cube law
The foregoing essay should be required reading for everyone who might watch an old SF movie or play a fantasy- or SF-based role-playing game.
Chapter 10: "The Incredible Shrinking People" (March 1968): a recitation of Asimov's struggles novelizing the film Fantastic Voyage in light of the horrendous scientific illiteracy of the screenplay; a nearly essential companion to the previous essay, and notable for its coverage of elements of human anatomy and physiology at the microscopic level
Section B: Chemistry
Chapter 11: "The First Metal" (December 1967): the metals known to the ancients (iron, copper, lead, tin, mercury, gold)
Chapter 12: "The Seventh Metal" (January 1968): mercury
Chapter 13: "The Predicted Metal" (February 1968): gallium, the development of periodic theory, John Alexander Reina Newlands, Mendeleev
Asimov nearly always began his science essays with a personal anecdote which he tied in, with greater or lesser plausibility, to the topic of his essay. This one has a sentence which, for reasons I don't fully understand, has stuck with me through the years...
"For example, there is the man who laughed at John Alexander Reina Newlands, and I would gladly point the finger of scorn at him if I only knew his name."
(Evidently, by the time Asimov wrote his Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, he had learned that the foremost of Newlands's mockers was a physics professor named George Carey Foster.)
Section C: Biology
Chapter 14: "The Terrible Lizards" (August 1968): a survey of the taxonomic classifications of dinosaurs
In this piece Asimov introduces Sir Richard Owen, a "scientific villain" who used dishonorable methods in attacking Darwin's Origin of Species, such as writing anonymous reviews praising his own work in multiple outlets. Nevertheless, Asimov concedes, "that can't be allowed to obscure the fact that he made important contributions to biology." He then proceeds to enumerate those contributions.
Chapter 15: "The Dying Lizards" (September 1968): mass extinctions and speculations on their causes
Chapter 16: "Counting Chromosomes" (June 1968): human chromosomes, trisomy-21, Down's Syndrome, sex chromosomes and aberrations thereof
Chapter 17: "Uncertain, Coy, and Hard to Please" (April 1969): sex roles, anthropology
(All essays are from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.)
Oddly enough, despite being an admirer of the Good Doctor for over twenty years, I've never read any of Asimov's Foundation, Galactic Empire, or Robots novels. That's right, not a single one--though I have read quite a few of his short stories and some of his later novels. There will be time, I think, for the works that made him famous and which everyone else thinks of when I effuse about Asimov. In the meantime, I have more of his science essays to read...
October 9, 2018
These essays are interesting because they reveal so much about how a scientist thinks and the series of discoveries that lead to whatever the current theory is about those things which have not clearly been proven and also those things we take as proven scientific fact. Asimov comes up with questions and ways of thinking which probably might not be posed by someone not as intensely curious as he was.
The copyright of the book is 1970 and includes essays from 1959 through 1969. Still it is fascinating reading.
The quote I find particularly outstanding because of our current political situation is this: " In the twenty-first century, then, I predict that women will be completely free for the first time in the history of the species."
The copyright of the book is 1970 and includes essays from 1959 through 1969. Still it is fascinating reading.
The quote I find particularly outstanding because of our current political situation is this: " In the twenty-first century, then, I predict that women will be completely free for the first time in the history of the species."
January 11, 2017
My favorite essay was about Mercury (the planet, not the element) and was full of etymology of various words associated with it. Very informative and a lovely poem included:
"And here's the happy bounding flea-
You cannot tell the he from she.
The sexes look alike, you see;
But she can tell, and so can he." :)
"And here's the happy bounding flea-
You cannot tell the he from she.
The sexes look alike, you see;
But she can tell, and so can he." :)
July 9, 2017
I picked this gem of a book up from a library discard "free books" pile. I have recently been really into space and science as a pleasant distraction from my first love, politics. I noticed through the discourse of this election
cycle that must not be named, that I do not understand enough about the basic science of things around me. When saw Asimov's name in the pile, I jumped at the chance for a free tutorial from a master.
His book is a readable, educational treat. The chapters are broken up into different topics like planets, dinosaurs, metals, and gender. I was shocked to read that astronomers have long suspected that something was off about Pluto, that maybe it wasn't a planet and that mathematically there should be another planet out there. What would Asimov think of citizen scientists working together with astronomers to find planet 9 on the internet at zooniverse.org !?
I think I could even use some of the chapters in Geography. Most notably the chapter on dinosaurs, gender and metals.
cycle that must not be named, that I do not understand enough about the basic science of things around me. When saw Asimov's name in the pile, I jumped at the chance for a free tutorial from a master.
His book is a readable, educational treat. The chapters are broken up into different topics like planets, dinosaurs, metals, and gender. I was shocked to read that astronomers have long suspected that something was off about Pluto, that maybe it wasn't a planet and that mathematically there should be another planet out there. What would Asimov think of citizen scientists working together with astronomers to find planet 9 on the internet at zooniverse.org !?
I think I could even use some of the chapters in Geography. Most notably the chapter on dinosaurs, gender and metals.
November 20, 2025
Non-fiction - I got a bit lost in Asimov's descriptions of orbits and ecliptics. The second series of essays is about chemistry and metals and the periodic table. There is some speculation as to how the dinosaurs died out. The last essay is about male/female relations which does not age well. I would be interested to see how his science discussions would have changed with today's discoveries.
No pharmacy references.
Canadian references - Canadian astronomer and Pluto; Canadian astronomer says planes are not possible.
No pharmacy references.
Canadian references - Canadian astronomer and Pluto; Canadian astronomer says planes are not possible.
January 1, 2022
A great collection of Asimov essays. My favourites were the ones on elements and metals. Needless to say, some of the science is outdated.
October 9, 2022
An excellent collection - a bit dated but highly readable.
September 20, 2015
For many years Isaac Asimov wrote a monthly science column for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Actually, I am not sure when he started the column nor when it ended, but I think it might be more appropriate to say that he wrote it for decades rather than many years. Every time enough of the columns accumulated to make a book they did just that. They were published in book form. This collection of science essays is one of those books. The book was published in 1970 and some of the essays date back to the 1950s, so some of the science is a bit outdated. However, most of it is not and one can read the book today and learn quite a bit, especially if one is a member of the lay audience. I would recommend it to young people who have an interest in science. I will not say that it will spark an interest in science because if one is reading it then one is likely to already have that interest, but it may very well strengthen the interest and intrigue at the same time. At least, when I read the book for the first time back when I was a teenager it had that effect on me. It has been a long time since I read that book and it was something of a nostalgia trip for me to do so again now. I was intrigued by both how much I had forgotten about it and how much I remembered. The last chapter was more social commentary than science, but when I read it this time I remembered it very well. Asimov was commenting on social trends that were current in the late 1960s and took an attitude that I mostly agreed with. I actually remember using some of his arguments in my own discussions. He devoted much of that chapter to a defense of feminism and, given the social circles in which he functioned, he was very progressive. I do note, though, reading it so many years after it was written, that he had a number of sexist assumptions weighing him down even while he was defending feminism. Based on what I know of Isaac Asimov, though, I think that if someone had pointed them out to him he would have promptly dropped them.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews