- Email: [email protected]
The queen of science
PEOPLE
The queen of science Mary Somerville transformed science from an obscure set of studies dominated by men into something far more egalitarian and accessible. Chris Baraniuk reveals her remarkable influence
V
ESUVIUS’S crater was spewing gases and snorting magma as the lady gingerly traversed it, handkerchief pressed to her nose. In places the lava had formed a crust hard enough to step on. As she peered through the cracks, glowing molten rock was visible beneath. It was December 1817 and Mary Somerville, the first great populariser of science, was following her passion. Not content with merely interpreting scientific research, Somerville was eager to see natural phenomena for herself and so gather source material for her greatest work, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. Published in 1834, it was a revelation. It was a compendium that brought the latest knowledge of every branch of physical science together in one place. What’s more, it was aimed at a mass audience – a pioneering piece of popular science writing that foreshadowed the magazines and bestselling books of today. Today Somerville’s name lives on in an Oxford college, but her wider legacy is largely forgotten. Later this year, though, she is due to be introduced to a fresh generation, as the new face of the Royal Bank of Scotland’s £10 banknote – the first non-royal woman to be honoured in this way. Born in 1780, Somerville grew up in the small town of Burntisland, not far from Edinburgh. She was fascinated by the natural world from the start, collecting shells and fossils, and observing birds and sea creatures. Though she was denied access to formal teaching beyond the basics, she was determined to educate herself, asking family friends for tuition in Latin, algebra, geology and natural history. “I sat up very late reading Euclid,” she wrote of her life around the age of 15 in her memoir, Personal Recollections 40 | NewScientist | 1 July 2017
from Early Life to Old Age. After contacting William Wallace, a prominent Scottish mathematician, she eagerly read every scientific book he recommended. Her world really began to expand in 1812 when she married William Somerville, an inspector for the Army Medical Board who shared her passion for science. They moved to London, joining the same social circles as the foremost writers, scientific thinkers and artists of the day. She and the artist J. M. W. Turner knew one another well. “I frequently went to Turner’s studio, and was always welcome,” she recalled in her memoir. When her husband was elected to the Royal Society and other eminent institutions, Somerville, barred from membership herself, began to write to other members asking for updates on their investigations. She wrote constantly, read the scientific papers she received, and jotted down all manner of science news in her journals. She spent much of 1817 on a tour through Europe, meeting many of her scientific heroes, including the adventurer Alexander von Humboldt. One notebook contained paragraphs on everything from the size of the sun to hurricanes in the South Pacific to the geology of the Cape of Good Hope. Personal connections she forged with eminent scientists were the lifeblood of what was to become Connexion. Von Humboldt shared stories of his expeditions. In an account of atmospheric pressure, Somerville wrote: “The air even on mountain tops is sufficiently rare to diminish the intensity of sound, to affect respiration, and to occasion a loss of muscular strength. The blood burst from the lips and ears of M. de Humboldt as he ascended the Andes.”
No branch of the physical sciences was unfamiliar to Mary Somerville
She learned about electromagnetism from Michael Faraday, distilling that knowledge into lucid explanations of electric current, attraction and repulsion, batteries and much more. From George Airy she learned about light, planetary orbits and how to calculate the density of Earth; from the astronomer John Herschel she gleaned accounts of nebulae and binary star systems. Another acquaintance, the politician Henry Brougham, persuaded Somerville to write her first work, an English version of the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste. Published in
read. But the book served another important function. Scientific societies – from the statistical to the meteorological – were popping up left, right and centre, yet catered mainly to very specific tastes. “Physical science is endlessly subdivided,” lamented the polymath William Whewell in his review of Connexion in The Quarterly Review. Demonstrating how everything is connected, as Somerville had done, was “to render a most important service to science”. A popular journal, Mechanics Magazine, wrote a glowing review of Connexion, ending by saying, “Read it! Read it!” Whewell’s review noted that even the most knowledgeable readers “cannot but be struck with admiration at the way in which the survey is brought up to the present day”. His review even contains the first use of the word “scientist”, as he searched for a collective term for the people whose work Somerville had gathered together.
principal and fellows of Somerville College, Oxford.
Finding Neptune
1831, Mechanism of the Heavens was used in teaching at the University of Cambridge for the next 50 years – something unheard-of for a woman at the time. Somerville was one of the people who helped that to change. Throughout her life she championed women’s right to knowledge, and the preface to Connexion described it as “my endeavour to make the laws by which the material world is governed more familiar to my countrywomen”. Men and women bought the book in their thousands. It was a huge success, widely acclaimed across Europe. Though it deals with
fundamental concepts of matter, radiation and gravitation, there are no equations, and unfamiliar terms are explained in language that a broad range of readers could understand. She also used analogy to great effect, describing, for example, an annular nebula as a bright ring “filled with a faint hazy light like fine gauze stretched over a hoop”. This is not to say the whole thing is an easy
“I hope to make the laws of the material world familiar to my countrywomen”
More than 9000 copies of Connexion were sold in the 1830s and it ran to 10 editions in all, each one revised completely. The book remained in demand throughout Somerville’s lifetime and was its publisher’s biggest-selling work of science until Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. Part of the book’s appeal was that it did not just state facts but asked questions about what was as yet unknown. The fifth edition highlighted anomalies in tables charting the positions of Uranus, hinting that there was perhaps an eighth planet whose gravitation could account for the discrepancies. British astronomer John Couch Adams read this and was inspired. He was later jointly credited for discovering Neptune. Hailed as the “queen of 19th-century science” on her death at the age of 91 in 1872, Somerville’s vast knowledge and tireless work in popularising an evolving discipline left its mark in many ways. It was she who introduced Ada Lovelace to Charles Babbage, inspiring her work on his analytical engine. Somerville was Lovelace’s mathematics tutor and chaperoned her to Babbage’s parties, where he showed off his calculating machines. Somerville spent her final days in Naples, having travelled there after witnessing another eruption of Vesuvius. “I have every reason to be thankful that my intellect is still unimpaired,” she wrote, not long before she died. “I am perfectly happy.” A happy choice too, that her pioneering life is now to be remembered on the currency of her native country. n 1 July 2017 | NewScientist | 41
The queen of science Mary Somerville transformed science from an obscure set of studies dominated by men into something far more egalitarian and accessible. Chris Baraniuk reveals her remarkable influence
V
ESUVIUS’S crater was spewing gases and snorting magma as the lady gingerly traversed it, handkerchief pressed to her nose. In places the lava had formed a crust hard enough to step on. As she peered through the cracks, glowing molten rock was visible beneath. It was December 1817 and Mary Somerville, the first great populariser of science, was following her passion. Not content with merely interpreting scientific research, Somerville was eager to see natural phenomena for herself and so gather source material for her greatest work, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. Published in 1834, it was a revelation. It was a compendium that brought the latest knowledge of every branch of physical science together in one place. What’s more, it was aimed at a mass audience – a pioneering piece of popular science writing that foreshadowed the magazines and bestselling books of today. Today Somerville’s name lives on in an Oxford college, but her wider legacy is largely forgotten. Later this year, though, she is due to be introduced to a fresh generation, as the new face of the Royal Bank of Scotland’s £10 banknote – the first non-royal woman to be honoured in this way. Born in 1780, Somerville grew up in the small town of Burntisland, not far from Edinburgh. She was fascinated by the natural world from the start, collecting shells and fossils, and observing birds and sea creatures. Though she was denied access to formal teaching beyond the basics, she was determined to educate herself, asking family friends for tuition in Latin, algebra, geology and natural history. “I sat up very late reading Euclid,” she wrote of her life around the age of 15 in her memoir, Personal Recollections 40 | NewScientist | 1 July 2017
from Early Life to Old Age. After contacting William Wallace, a prominent Scottish mathematician, she eagerly read every scientific book he recommended. Her world really began to expand in 1812 when she married William Somerville, an inspector for the Army Medical Board who shared her passion for science. They moved to London, joining the same social circles as the foremost writers, scientific thinkers and artists of the day. She and the artist J. M. W. Turner knew one another well. “I frequently went to Turner’s studio, and was always welcome,” she recalled in her memoir. When her husband was elected to the Royal Society and other eminent institutions, Somerville, barred from membership herself, began to write to other members asking for updates on their investigations. She wrote constantly, read the scientific papers she received, and jotted down all manner of science news in her journals. She spent much of 1817 on a tour through Europe, meeting many of her scientific heroes, including the adventurer Alexander von Humboldt. One notebook contained paragraphs on everything from the size of the sun to hurricanes in the South Pacific to the geology of the Cape of Good Hope. Personal connections she forged with eminent scientists were the lifeblood of what was to become Connexion. Von Humboldt shared stories of his expeditions. In an account of atmospheric pressure, Somerville wrote: “The air even on mountain tops is sufficiently rare to diminish the intensity of sound, to affect respiration, and to occasion a loss of muscular strength. The blood burst from the lips and ears of M. de Humboldt as he ascended the Andes.”
No branch of the physical sciences was unfamiliar to Mary Somerville
She learned about electromagnetism from Michael Faraday, distilling that knowledge into lucid explanations of electric current, attraction and repulsion, batteries and much more. From George Airy she learned about light, planetary orbits and how to calculate the density of Earth; from the astronomer John Herschel she gleaned accounts of nebulae and binary star systems. Another acquaintance, the politician Henry Brougham, persuaded Somerville to write her first work, an English version of the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste. Published in
read. But the book served another important function. Scientific societies – from the statistical to the meteorological – were popping up left, right and centre, yet catered mainly to very specific tastes. “Physical science is endlessly subdivided,” lamented the polymath William Whewell in his review of Connexion in The Quarterly Review. Demonstrating how everything is connected, as Somerville had done, was “to render a most important service to science”. A popular journal, Mechanics Magazine, wrote a glowing review of Connexion, ending by saying, “Read it! Read it!” Whewell’s review noted that even the most knowledgeable readers “cannot but be struck with admiration at the way in which the survey is brought up to the present day”. His review even contains the first use of the word “scientist”, as he searched for a collective term for the people whose work Somerville had gathered together.
principal and fellows of Somerville College, Oxford.
Finding Neptune
1831, Mechanism of the Heavens was used in teaching at the University of Cambridge for the next 50 years – something unheard-of for a woman at the time. Somerville was one of the people who helped that to change. Throughout her life she championed women’s right to knowledge, and the preface to Connexion described it as “my endeavour to make the laws by which the material world is governed more familiar to my countrywomen”. Men and women bought the book in their thousands. It was a huge success, widely acclaimed across Europe. Though it deals with
fundamental concepts of matter, radiation and gravitation, there are no equations, and unfamiliar terms are explained in language that a broad range of readers could understand. She also used analogy to great effect, describing, for example, an annular nebula as a bright ring “filled with a faint hazy light like fine gauze stretched over a hoop”. This is not to say the whole thing is an easy
“I hope to make the laws of the material world familiar to my countrywomen”
More than 9000 copies of Connexion were sold in the 1830s and it ran to 10 editions in all, each one revised completely. The book remained in demand throughout Somerville’s lifetime and was its publisher’s biggest-selling work of science until Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. Part of the book’s appeal was that it did not just state facts but asked questions about what was as yet unknown. The fifth edition highlighted anomalies in tables charting the positions of Uranus, hinting that there was perhaps an eighth planet whose gravitation could account for the discrepancies. British astronomer John Couch Adams read this and was inspired. He was later jointly credited for discovering Neptune. Hailed as the “queen of 19th-century science” on her death at the age of 91 in 1872, Somerville’s vast knowledge and tireless work in popularising an evolving discipline left its mark in many ways. It was she who introduced Ada Lovelace to Charles Babbage, inspiring her work on his analytical engine. Somerville was Lovelace’s mathematics tutor and chaperoned her to Babbage’s parties, where he showed off his calculating machines. Somerville spent her final days in Naples, having travelled there after witnessing another eruption of Vesuvius. “I have every reason to be thankful that my intellect is still unimpaired,” she wrote, not long before she died. “I am perfectly happy.” A happy choice too, that her pioneering life is now to be remembered on the currency of her native country. n 1 July 2017 | NewScientist | 41