Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderScience synthesis biography

Mary Somerville's 1834 book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences explained to general readers how astronomy, physics, chemistry and geology fit together. A review of it gave English the word 'scientist'.

Mary Somerville

ScienceLiteratureBiography

The story behind the card

Somerville was born in Scotland in 1780 and had only about a year of formal schooling. She taught herself algebra and geometry against her family's wishes, and her second husband, William Somerville, encouraged her studies. Her 1831 book The Mechanism of the Heavens, which explained the French mathematician Laplace's work on the movements of the planets, made her famous. Reviewing her 1834 book, the Cambridge scholar William Whewell noted that English had no general word for people who study the sciences, and suggested 'scientist', on the model of 'artist'. In 1835 she and Caroline Herschel became the first women elected honorary members of the Royal Astronomical Society. Somerville College, Oxford, is named after her, and her portrait appears on the Royal Bank of Scotland's £10 note issued in 2017.

Türkçe oku
Mary Somerville'in 1834'te yayımlanan On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (Fizik Bilimlerinin Bağlantısı Üzerine) kitabı, astronomi, fizik, kimya ve jeolojinin birbirine nasıl bağlandığını genel okura anlattı. İngilizcedeki “scientist” (bilim insanı) sözcüğü, bu kitap üzerine yazılan bir eleştiride doğdu.

Somerville 1780'de İskoçya'da doğdu ve yalnızca bir yıl kadar okula gidebildi. Ailesi istemediği hâlde cebiri ve geometriyi kendi kendine öğrendi; ikinci eşi William Somerville ise çalışmalarını destekledi. Fransız matematikçi Laplace'ın gezegenlerin hareketleri üzerine çalışmasını açıkladığı 1831 tarihli The Mechanism of the Heavens (Göklerin İşleyişi) kitabı onu ünlü yaptı. Cambridge'li bilgin William Whewell, 1834 tarihli kitabı değerlendirirken İngilizcede bilimlerle uğraşan herkesi kapsayan bir sözcük olmadığını belirtti ve “artist” (sanatçı) örneğinden yola çıkarak “scientist” sözcüğünü önerdi. 1835'te Somerville ile Caroline Herschel, Kraliyet Astronomi Derneği'ne onursal üye seçilen ilk kadınlar oldu. Oxford'daki Somerville College onun adını taşır; portresi, Royal Bank of Scotland'ın 2017'de bastığı 10 sterlinlik banknotta yer alır.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Mary Somerville
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderScience

Émilie du Châtelet, an 18th-century French mathematician, translated Isaac Newton's Principia from Latin into French and added a long commentary explaining his physics. Published after her death, it is still the standard French translation.

The Principia, published in 1687, is the book in which Newton set out his laws of motion and gravity, in Latin. Du Châtelet read Latin, Italian, Greek and German from childhood. From the mid-1730s she lived and worked with the writer Voltaire at Cirey, her husband's château in north-eastern France, where the two studied Newton together. In 1740 she published her own book on physics, Institutions de Physique. She took part in the debate over vis viva, or 'living force', supporting the view that a moving body's force depends on its mass times the square of its speed, close to today's idea of kinetic energy. She began the Principia translation in 1745 and worked on it intensely while pregnant, finishing shortly before she died in September 1749, days after giving birth, aged 42. It appeared in 1756, and in full in 1759.

Émilie du ChâteletRead card
WonderSpace

In 1962 John Glenn asked for NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson to check the electronic computer's orbit calculations by hand before his flight. If she said the numbers were good, he said, he was ready to go. He became the first American to orbit Earth.

Johnson worked from 1953 at the Langley research centre in Virginia, first for NASA's predecessor, NACA, and then for NASA. She began among the 'human computers', mostly women who did calculations by hand, in the segregated West Area Computing unit for Black mathematicians. She calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard's 1961 flight, checked Glenn's orbit and later worked on Apollo 11's path to the Moon. When Apollo 13 was crippled in 1970, her work on backup procedures and charts helped the crew return safely. She retired in 1986, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 and became widely known through the 2016 book and film Hidden Figures. She died in 2020, aged 101.

NASARead card
WonderBiography

In her 1925 doctoral thesis, the British-American astronomer Cecilia Payne showed that stars are made mostly of hydrogen and helium, unlike the Earth. She read this from starlight split into its colours, using new physics that explained how heat strips electrons from atoms.

At the time, astronomers assumed stars had roughly the same make-up as the Earth. Working at Harvard College Observatory, Payne showed that the differences between star spectra, starlight spread out into its colours, came mainly from temperature rather than composition, and that hydrogen was vastly more abundant than anyone expected. Henry Norris Russell, the leading American astronomer, found this implausible, and in the published thesis she called her own hydrogen figure 'almost certainly not real'. Four years later Russell reached the same result by other means and acknowledged her work. The astronomers Otto Struve and Velta Zebergs later called hers the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy. In 1956 she became the first woman promoted to full professor in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Cecilia Payne-GaposchkinRead card
WonderBiography

In 1912 Henrietta Swan Leavitt found that certain pulsing stars, called Cepheids, take longer to brighten and dim the brighter they really are. That rule turned them into cosmic measuring sticks: by timing a Cepheid, astronomers can work out how far away it is.

Leavitt joined Harvard College Observatory in 1893, at first as a volunteer, as one of the women known as 'computers' who measured stars on photographic plates for low pay. Studying the Magellanic Clouds, two small galaxies whose stars all lie at roughly the same distance from us, she catalogued 1,777 variable stars. Because they were all about equally far away, a Cepheid that looked brighter really was brighter, which revealed the link between brightness and period. Once others had measured the distances to a few nearby Cepheids, the rule could be used anywhere. In the 1920s Edwin Hubble used it to show that the Andromeda nebula lies far outside the Milky Way. Leavitt died in 1921, before the importance of her work was widely recognised.

Henrietta Swan LeavittRead card
WonderBiography

At 19, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated that a white dwarf, the dense core left when a star like the Sun dies, cannot be more than about 1.4 times the Sun's mass. Above this limit, now named after him, it can no longer hold itself up against its own gravity.

Chandrasekhar did the calculation in 1930 on the ship taking him from India to England to study at Cambridge, combining quantum mechanics with Einstein's special relativity. A white dwarf is held up by electron degeneracy pressure: when electrons are squeezed very tightly together, they resist being packed any closer, a purely quantum effect. He showed that this resistance has a ceiling. When he presented the result in 1935, the influential astronomer Arthur Eddington mocked it in public, and many colleagues sided with Eddington for years, although the mathematics was right. The limit is now central to understanding supernovae and neutron stars. Chandrasekhar shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the structure and evolution of stars.

Subrahmanyan ChandrasekharRead card
Next card in the archiveMaria Sibylla Merian, a German-born artist and naturalist, painted each stage of an insect's life, from egg to caterpillar to butterfly, on the plant it fed on. Her 1705 book on the insects of Suriname joined close observation with art.Read next →