The Northern Lights: How One Man Sacrificed Love, Happiness and Sanity to Solve the Mystery of the Aurora Borealis - Softcover

Jago, Lucy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014029015X ISBN 13: 9780140290158

Publisher: Penguin, 2002

Synopsis

Just over one hundred years ago Kristian Birkeland looked into the night sky of his native Norway and saw in the beautiful Northern Lights a mystery waiting to be solved. Determined to prove to the world his bold theory about the heavens above, thismisunderstood genius began a quest that would take him from Norway's ice mountains to the deserts of Africa. It was a quest that alienated friends and family, ruined his health and sanity, and ended in his mysterious death in a Japanese hotel in 1917. Lucy Jago brilliantly tells the fascinating and tragic story of Kristian Birkeland, the man who saw in the night sky a secret that no one else could see, but who died trying to convince the world of his vision.

About this title

Review:

The Northern Lights is Lucy Jago's compassionate account of the lonely and ultimately tragic life of Kristian Birkeland, the pioneer of our understanding of the Aurora Borealis. The cost of scientific advancement should not be measured in purely financial terms--illumination did not come cheaply to Birkeland, who experienced poor health, heavy solitary drinking, a failed marriage, resentment from colleagues and lack of international respect. In fact, it took until nearly 50 years after his death in 1917 for his theories to be substantiated, a delay which slowed the advance of geomagnetic and auroral physics. As well a scientific biography, The Northern Lights is also the story of a small nation trying to come out from the shadow of larger ones, to be accorded respect scientifically and to gain political independence.

Birkeland led expeditions to the freezing wastes of northern Norway to prove that the phenomenon Aristotle had called "jumping goats" and Galileo had termed boreale aurora, was caused by a flow of electric particles from the sun. He also went to Africa to study the Zodiacal Light, which he believed to be similarly derived but by then his mental and physical health were deteriorating fast, paranoia convincing him that the British, whose scientific fraternity had so stubbornly disdained his work, were spying on him. Unintentionally eccentric, as a university professor he wore a red fez and red leather Egyptian slippers and his idea of courtship involved sending a female admirer a sack of potatoes or perhaps some dried flatfish. As side-projects, he was also the inventor of the world's first commercial fertiliser maker and a more sinister electro-magnetic cannon. This is splendid, alleviating stuff for a biographer and former documentary producer Lucy Jago breathes commendably thawing air into a potentially icy subject. Fastidiously researched and recounted with unbounded vigour, the obvious comparison is with Dava Sobel's Longitude but perhaps the more pertinent one is with Richard Panek's history of the telescope, Seeing and Believing, for its concise science and accessible narrative. Either way, Jago's assured debut does great credit to an obsessive inquirer who sacrificed his life, too literally, for celestial enlightenment. --David Vincent

Review:

"As gripping as a Conan Doyle adventure." -Harper's Magazine

"Fascinating... evokes the manic, punishing era of polar exploration."- The New York Times Book Review

"A fascinating nugget of history... Jago charts her course unerringly."-Chicago Tribune

"Jago deftly paints a historical background for some of the most important concepts in electromagnetic theory today, breathing life into [her] subject."-Scientific American

"Thrilling... if you like a Faustian fable, war, and weird science, then this is for you."-Conde Nast Traveler

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 014029015X
• ISBN 13: 9780140290158
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320