Skulls in the Stars

Some of the most interesting stories in the history of science are those where investigations take a wrong turn.  Scientific progress is filled with red herrings, failed assumptions, and wild guesses that rarely make it into the science textbooks.  When I first started this blog, for instance, I talked about the ridiculous number of atomic models that were proposed before Rutherford finally discovered the atomic nucleus in 1910.

It’s a shame that these stories are often overlooked, because they can often tell us more about how science is done than the famous success stories can.  And, as I said above, these failures are often fascinating, and in the hands of a great writer can be utterly compelling.

I was therefore really excited to read Thomas Levenson’s most recent book, The Hunt for Vulcan (2015):

The Hunt for Vulcan tells the curious story of how physicists and astronomers became convinced of the existence of a planet that orbits closer to the Sun than Mercury, a planet that never existed.   The search for Vulcan would eventually lead to one of the greatest scientific discoveries in history: Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which unifies gravity with Einstein’s special theory of relativity and truly transformed our understanding of the universe as a whole.  Along the way, there were personal squabbles among scientists, failed searches, mistaken discoveries, and a World War that altered the course of science.

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Over the past few years, we’ve been treated to a stunning array of achievements in space exploration, such as the Juno Mission (inserted into orbit around Jupiter on July 4, 2016), New Horizons (passed Pluto on July 14, 2015), and Rosetta (landed on a comet on November 12, 2014). These missions are all mind-boggling accomplishments, and naturally raise the question: how did we get so awesome at space travel?  I’m not even talking about the reasonably well-known early history of NASA’s manned space flight program, but even earlier, when rocket travel out of the earth’s atmosphere was considered an impossible dream by many.

Breaking the Chains of Gravity (2016), by Amy Shira Teitel, takes an in-depth, fascinating, and compelling look at this early history.

Breaking the Chains of Gravity begins with the early rocket hobbyists in Germany in the 1930s and ends with the formation of NASA in 1959.  The path to space would be driven by some of the greatest minds and boldest hearts in the world, and would take many dramatic twists and turns along the way.  Among the stories told are the dramatic escape of Wernher von Braun from the Germans and into the protective arms of the Americans, the dramatic rocket-powered flight of Chuck Yeager that broke the sound barrier, and the insane self-experimentation of John Stapp on the biological effects of high g-forces.  All these stories are woven into a compelling and enjoyable narrative that gives a clear impression of how everything came to pass.

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