Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful Story, January 14, 2002
This review is from: The Northern Lights: The True Story of the Man Who Unlocked the Secrets of the Aurora Borealis (Hardcover)
Words fail to describe the Aurora. Photographs cannot capture their essence. Science wrestled with an adequate explanation. At the turn of the century, Kristian Birkeland used the latest technology to observe and measure auroral phenomena. His theories so astonished the scientific community that they were rejected outright. Not until fifty years later did satellite data confirm that Birkeland had gotten it mostly right. Kristian Birkeland was a bright and driven man, not afraid to implement his ideas, and persuasive enough to gather backing for them. He developed a number of industrial processes. Members of his team died & became disabled, battling the elements to extract knowledge. Lucy Jago tells his story well. She puts the reader into blizzards and hardship. She amazes us with the bull-headed denial of the British scientists who refused to consider Birkeland's theories, in spite of the evidence he provided. She helps us feel the growing isolation of this driven man. The book is based on primary historical sources, as well as secondary works. Jago opted not to clutter the text with footnotes, but provided a solid bibliography. Jago's book reminds us of an era when science was dangerous and uncertain. Research didn't take place in multi-billion dollar government laboratories. Funding was even more uncertain then than now. Kristian Birkeland had tremendous drive, courage and charisma--and Jago makes this available to us. At a deeper level, Birkeland's story challenges readers to examine their own lives. Birkeland's theory, one paid for in blood, was rejected by scientific peers because they could not open their minds wide enough to accept surprising information. Today we call this denial. We are left to ponder which truths we deny because they would disrupt our comfortable status quo. (If you'd like to discuss this book or review further, please click on the "about me" link above & drop me an email. Thanks!)
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Delight, October 30, 2001
This review is from: The Northern Lights: The True Story of the Man Who Unlocked the Secrets of the Aurora Borealis (Hardcover)
A delightful read - Jago has found a comfortable balance between the educational and the entertaining. While paying homage to the great mind of Birkeland, The Northern Lights provides an inside view of both science at the turn of the century and Norway's push for independence. Starting the book, I was expecting a depressing tale. Instead, I found myself awed by Birkeland's brilliance and inspired by his passion for discovery. The book follows step-by-step through his quest for answers and his struggle to prove the theories which he knew to be true. One can't help but feel sorry for Birkeland, who was certainly a victim of circumstance. Yet, 80+ years after the fact, the harsh details of his final days seem to be overshadowed by the splendor of the years preceding them. During that time, Birkeland proposed and defended prophetic pictures of the solar system. Like many great ideas, it took time for mankind to digest them. This book is proof that, in the grander scheme of things, his labors have been acknowledged.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Forgotten Scientist, Realistically Remembered, December 30, 2001
This review is from: The Northern Lights: The True Story of the Man Who Unlocked the Secrets of the Aurora Borealis (Hardcover)
It was only in the 1960s that satellites and scientists had given a full scale explanation of why the northern lights occurred. It comes as a surprise to learn, then, that they were essentially confirming the work of a scientist of the early twentieth century, the first to study the aurora and to get the explanation right. It was a stunning scientific achievement, accomplished with the sort of icy adventure one associates with polar explorers, and he accomplished a good deal of other original work, too, but the name of Kristian Birkeland is almost unknown. It is a good thing that we now have _The Northern Lights: The True Story of the Man Who Unlocked the Secrets of the Aurora Borealis_ (Knopf) by Lucy Jago. Jago starts with a harrowing description of Birkeland's expeditions to northern observatories to get data, told with a novelist's skill. He needed the data to confirm his intuitions that the lights were due to the magnetic activity of the sun. If this weren't enough, Birkeland then went to the lab to design a series of vacuum chambers which could reproduce in miniature the solar system and could demonstrate the aurora artificially. His work, however, was barely mentioned in England, and then unfavorably. Birkeland's ideas confounded a unanimous opinion of British scientists, and the Royal Society, that space was a vacuum and nothing more; Lord Kelvin himself had decreed that the sun could have no effect on geomagnetic activity. Jago speculates that the slowness of acceptance of Birkeland's ideas set back auroral and geomagnetic physics by fifty years. Confirming his ideas so that even the British scientific establishment would have to accept them set Birkeland to thinking of a grand plan of several observatories around the Arctic which could do such things as triangulation to get a better picture of where the lights were. Such a plan would take a great deal of money. One of the strengths of Jago's biography is that she has told a good deal about Birkeland's drive for finance. He was granted various patents, including the one for pulling nitrogen out of the air to make fertilizer, the one that made him rich. Birkeland's dedication to his work took its toll on his health and his personal life. A late marriage was short-lived, and he descended into paranoia, probably fueled by overuse of alcohol and barbiturates to calm some sort of mania. He was successful in his financial dealings, but they brought him into conflict with the director of Norsk Hydro, who may have betrayed Birkeland out of a Nobel Prize. However, Birkeland was a likeable absentminded professor, drifting on walks between his tram stop and his office in a preoccupation of technical dreams. He was unable to keep a diary, remember appointments, or attend to accounting principles. He had the admirable trait of knowing how scientific knowledge was gained: "You learn more from your mistakes than your victories," he once said cheerfully, after being thrown through the air by an unexpected massive spark. He died in 1917, a minor scientific hero to his own Norway, but since his ideas have been confirmed by space exploration, his scientific stature has risen. A crater on the Moon is named for him, and "Birkeland Current" is now the proper name for the vertical flow of electrical particles which cause the auroras. He also finally has a fascinating and full biography to tell us about his unique genius.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
