Black Holes: a Very Short Introduction' and Rothery, 'Moons: a Very Short Introduction'

H-Sci-Med-Tech DeGroot on Blundell, 'Black Holes: A Very Short Introduction' and Rothery, 'Moons: A Very Short Introduction'

Review published on Wednesday, July 4, 2018

Katherine Blundell. Black Holes: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Illustrations. xix + 100 pp. $11.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-19-960266-7.David A. Rothery. Moons: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Illustrations. xv + 153 pp. $11.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-19-873527-4.

Reviewed by Dagomar DeGroot (Georgetown University) Published on H-Sci-Med-Tech (July, 2018) Commissioned by Kathryn Olesko (Georgetown University)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=49307

“Space is having a moment,” a major publisher told me recently. Maybe. Public interest does seem to be rising, spurred by both the extraordinary accomplishments of international space agencies (with probes zipping past Pluto, spinning around a comet, and plunging through the rings of Saturn) and an emerging arms race between tycoons who promise to make space accessible for everyone. Is this indeed a fleeting moment of public excitement, or a more significant conceptual and material transformation of humanity’s engagement with outer space? My money is on the latter, in which case historians may want to do what we have always done: study the past in new ways to better understand what really matters in the present.

Two new entries in the Oxford University Press Very Short Introductions series should help us do just that. Both books summarize how scientists past and present understand distinct kinds of objects in space. Yet the objects considered in each book could not be more different, which means that the books will be useful to different kinds of historians.

David A. Rothery’s Moons may be just the kind of book that environmental historians need to (intellectually) take their students beyond Earth. For decades, environmental historians have tried to figure out how the non-human world mattered for the human past. Lately, a small but growing number have insisted that the world is not enough. The field, they argue, should not end with the ends of the Earth: the seemingly absolute but really quite porous border between the atmosphere and outer space. Instead, it should incorporate the ways that people have understood environments beyond Earth, responded to changes in those environments, and even (lately) transformed those environments.

If these insurgents—and, full disclosure, I am one of them—are right, we need concise books that introduce our students to the environmental actors in our histories. Enter the moon, or rather, Moons. In just 144 pages (including appendices), planetary scientist Rothery aims at nothing less than a concise guide not just to the moon but to all the moons—or at least, all we have found in our solar system.

Despite its slender size, Moons is packed with delightful detail. Did you know that the sun’s light nudges small moons in their orbits? That a video game developer owns private property on our moon? That scientists have gathered more moon rocks on the Earth than Soviet probes brought back from the moon? I did not, and I doubt my students will, either. Even facts I did know—the brighter the rays around a lunar crater, for example, the younger it is—gain new dimensions in Rothery’s elegant prose.

Rothery is at his best when giving simple, jargon-free explanations of complex science. Orbital mechanics may seem dull and too technical for short summary, yet Rothery makes it easy to understand why asteroids in “horseshoe orbits” are not moons, or how orbital resonances account for seas below the ice crusts of giant gas moons. One particularly compelling example uses a series of well-chosen photographs to reveal how the moon’s surface is a natural archive engraved with a history of our solar system.

By contrast, Rothery’s attempts at human history are less effective. His history of lunar science hits on some big names and breakthroughs but leaves out the cultural contexts in which science takes shape. This is the kind of “internalist” account of great scientists and sudden insights that no longer convinces historians interested in how science actually evolves. Rothery devotes a chapter to “the moon’s influence on us,” and covers some obvious ground—telling time and tides, for example—but misses a raft of fascinating topics, from the seventeenth-century discovery of the lunar environment to the great moon hoax of the nineteenth century. Naturally, a “very short introduction” can only include so much content before it stops being short. Yet environmental historians and their students would do well to read Moons alongside other scholarship that covers the human story of moons in greater detail.

Katherine Blundell’s Black Holes is just about as slender asMoons , and written in a similarly engaging style. It rarely explains its science with the effortless grace that Rothery manages to achieve, partly because the mind-bending physics of black holes are less accessible to the average reader than the science of moons. Blundell, an astrophysicist, admits that she faces an unusual problem: mathematics can precisely communicate the true nature of black holes but only in a way that will baffle many readers, while descriptive words can provide easy to understand explanations at the cost of accuracy. She compromises with a series of cleverly chosen figures that will prove fascinating to the historian. Many deal with relationships between time and space, which are badly distorted near black holes, and many therefore also represent causality with a series of lines and points. Strangely, a book about the physics of black holes has something to say about how historians can visually depict historical events, and how they might conceptualize the options open to historical agents.

Many historians would benefit in an abstract sense from readingBlack Holes, but it is harder to figure out how they could assign the book to students. Black holes are too intellectually and physically remote to feature in classes devoted to the environmental history of space, and they seem a stretch for inclusion in even the biggest of big history courses. Historians of science, by contrast, may be able to use Black Holes to give their students an interesting perspective on the history of the most exotic ideas in physics.

Blundell delves deeper into the history of science than Rothery does, since black holes straddle the

Citation: H-Net Reviews. DeGroot on Blundell, 'Black Holes: A Very Short Introduction' and Rothery, 'Moons: A Very Short Introduction'. H-Sci-Med-Tech. 07-06-2018. https://networks.h-net.org/node/9782/reviews/2007941/degroot-blundell-black-holes-very-short-introduction-and-rothery Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Sci-Med-Tech boundaries between Newtonian, relativistic, and quantum physics. In a sense, the history of scientific thinking about black holes—or “dark stars,” as a few precocious scholars imagined them in the eighteenth century—mirrors the history of the related disciplines of physics and cosmology. Blundell occasionally suggests links between broader social developments and the history of science, but she concentrates on an internalist summary of the personal breakthroughs of standout scientists.

Maybe describing the social context of science would have led Blundell away from her main subject—the nature of black holes—and bewilder readers already confronted by a barrage of unfamiliar ideas. Still, the cultural and intellectual contexts and consequences of the scientific revolutions Blundell describes were so important that leaving them out seems like a missed opportunity (at least for a historian). These omissions will admittedly make it harder for historians of science to assign Black Holes to their students. Yet the book may still serve as an elegant and concise introduction to a pivotal subject in the science and history of physics, one that instructors can easily supplement with more rigorous histories of science.

Because they are short, relatively comprehensive, and aimed at educated laypeople, books in Oxford’s Very Short Introductions series resemble a “thinking reader’s Wikipedia,” as literary critic Boyd Tonkin has called them. In just 150 pages or fewer, each book aims to tackle all that is really important about a subject, no matter how complex.Moons and Black Holes reflect both the impressive strengths and very real limitations of that approach. Both will prove stimulating for some readers and likely provoke further study, yet others might be beguiled by what, as we have seen, is merely an illusion of comprehensiveness. For some readers, in other words, the books will excite more curiosity and more reading, while for others they will seem like the last word on subjects that can never really be fully explored in fewer than 150 pages. A Wikipedia page, by contrast, could not easily seem as authoritative. It is worth asking whether some subjects lend themselves to short summaries better than others, and what gets cut in the interests of being concise.

In recent decades, one previously Earthbound discipline after another has found its way to space. Astrobiologists, for example, now hunt for life on or under the surface of Mars, Europa, Enceladus, Titan, and many other worlds across our solar system. Exoarchaeologists search for dormant spacecraft and (more controversially) long-lost civilizations. Anthropologists study the intellectual colonization of space, from newly discovered exoplanets to the surface of Pluto.

Historians, it seems, can profitably follow in their wake by engaging with outer space in new ways. Historians of science have long studied astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, and planetary science, although popular interest in space may now lend new urgency to these subjects. Yet environmental historians have only just begun to appreciate that environments beyond Earth have helped shape human history, and courses on big history—including the cosmic histories that set the course of human evolution—are becoming possible for the first time.

Historians are poised to provide innovative new perspectives on histories that have led us to today’s transformative moment in humanity’s engagement with outer space. To write and teach the new narratives of the final frontier, however, they will need concise, interdisciplinary books that summarize the past and present of space and space science. Both Moons and Black Holes fit the bill, even if neither describe human history in ways that will be entirely convincing to the historian.

Citation: Dagomar DeGroot. Review of Blundell, Katherine, Black Holes: A Very Short Introduction and Rothery, David A., Moons: A Very Short Introduction. H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews. July, 2018. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=49307

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.