ScienceWeek

MARY SOMERVILLE (1780-1872) AND GRAVITY

Mary Fairfax Somerville (1780-1872) was a mathematician, scientist, and translator who in a most serious and significant sense popularized the Newtonian universe, in particular as expounded by Laplace. The story is told of Laplace, over dinner in Paris, remarking to Somerville that "only two women have ever read the Mecanique Celeste; both are Scotch women: Mrs. Greig and yourself." (During her first marriage, Somerville was known as Mrs. Greig.)

In fact, Somerville not only had read it but also had translated it into English -- and "into common language" -- under the title /The Mechanism of the Heavens/. The success of her second book, /On the Connection of the Physical Sciences/, excerpted here, led to her election to the Royal Astronomical Society, of which she and Caroline Herschel became the first women members.

Excerpt from Somerville's /On the Connection of the Physical Sciences/ (1840):

"Astronomy affords the most extensive example of the connection of the physical sciences. In it are combined the sciences of number and quantity, of rest and motion. In it we perceive the operation of a force which is mixed up with every thing that exists in the heavens or on Earth; which pervades every atom, rules the motions of animate and inanimate beings, and is as sensible in the descent of a rain drop as in the falls of Niagara; in the weight of the air, as in the periods of the Moon. Gravitation not only binds satellites to their planet, and planets to the Sun, but it connects sun with sun throughout the wide extent of creation, and is the cause of the disturbances, as well as of the order, of nature: since every tremor it excites in any one planet is immediately transmitted to the farthest limits of the system, in oscillations, which correspond in their periods with the cause of producing them, like sympathetic notes in music, or vibrations from the deep tones of an organ."

Adapted from: Dennis R. Danielson (Ed.): The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclitus to Hawking. Perseus Publishing 2000, p.298. More information: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738204986/scienceweek