An Orrery Publication
The people behind the physics
Short stories from the history of science. Each one takes a figure and works in three movements: the myth as it is usually told, the truth behind it, and why the truth is very often the better story. We do not novelise — where the record is thin, we say so.
Lives and FamiliesJagadish Chandra Bose is remembered as the man who beat Marconi to radio and then refused, on principle, to patent anything. He did neither. What he did do was stranger and more human: he filed for patents in partnership with an American violinist's widow, let an Irish-born nun help write his books without naming her, and lived for years on a wife's household economies — and the two famous myths about him owe a great deal to people close to him.
Points of DiscoveryGeneral anaesthesia is dated to a Boston operating theatre in October 1846. A village surgeon in Kii province had already removed a breast tumour from a sleeping sixty-year-old woman in October 1804, and went on operating that way for the rest of his life. The best-known account of how he got there — a blinded wife, a mother killed by the trials — comes mostly from a novel.
Points of InterestThe giant stone instruments of Jaipur and Delhi are often presented as an ancient observatory, and sometimes as the work of a king who never heard of the telescope. They were built in the 1720s and 1730s by a ruler who had telescopes, sent a mission to Europe for its astronomical tables, and chose masonry anyway — for a reason that had to do with measuring, not looking.
Lives and FamiliesSrinivasa Ramanujan is remembered as the untaught genius who received formulas from a goddess in his sleep. He said something close to that himself. But the book that shaped him, the examinations he failed, the marriage arranged when his wife was a child, and the diagnosis nobody made are all on the record — and together they are a stranger story than the one about dreams.
Points of DiscoveryThe story says Tu Youyou found the cure for malaria in a 1,600-year-old book. She did read the book — but the sentence that mattered was an instruction about water temperature, and it only mattered because 190 previous samples had failed.
Points of DiscoveryIbn al-Haytham is routinely called the first true scientist and the father of the scientific method — a title built mostly in the last hundred years. What he actually did in a darkened room in Cairo, with a hole in the wall and a set of lamps, was rarer than the title and better documented.
Lives and FamiliesIn 1957 two theorists won the Nobel Prize for predicting that nature plays favorites at the subatomic level. The physicist who proved it in the lab stood offstage — and the reason is stranger, and more procedural, than the story usually told.
Points of InterestA bronze jar in a Han-dynasty palace reportedly caught a tremor that no one in the capital could feel. The device is real. The one story everyone tells about it comes from a single text written three centuries later, describing a machine that no longer exists.
The Myth and the TruthBarbara McClintock was already one of the most decorated geneticists in America when she found something her colleagues could not yet believe. The real story of what happened next is stranger, and more specific, than the legend of thirty years in the wilderness.
The Myth and the TruthRobert Hooke named the cell, wrote the century's most beautiful book, surveyed half of London after it burned, and quarrelled with Newton. No authenticated portrait of him survives — and the reason usually given for that is itself a myth.
The Myth and the TruthMax Planck did not believe in the quantum. He called it an act of desperation, spent a decade trying to take it back, and lost almost everything he had to a century he never wanted.