The best books about the poetic side of science

Every few years, I return to this book for its sheer elegance.

Richard Holmes made his name as the foremost biographer of England’s romantic poets–Shelley, Coleridge, the lot. Eventually, he fell, like them, under the thrall of the science of their age.

The attraction between artists and scientists was mutual. Coleridge attended the public lectures on chemistry by Humphry Davy because they “improved his stocks in metaphors”; William Herschel composed two dozen symphonies before he put an eye to a telescope; and Mary Shelley wrote (a few years after electricity made frog legs twitch) a darkly prescient account of baron Frankenstein’s deeds.

Richard Holmes’ book has all the uplift and effortless grace of a balloon flight (and my favorite chapter is on ballooning, actually–it serves as a prelude to Holmes’ equally spellbinding “Falling Upwards”).   

Germans can be romantic, too, if they set about it in earnest.

Young Alexander von Humboldt didn’t do things by halves. He made his own muscles twitch rather than a dead frog’s. Initially, he used the current from a galvanic cell (which made him faint). He later took up electric eels from Venezuela, caught with the unwilling help of wild horses.

Humboldt spent a large part of his fortune on a five-year journey through Latin America, which catapulted him to fame. The rest of his money went into publishing dozens of volumes relating to his explorations and describing the Cosmos, all of it large and small. His once widely admired style makes today’s readers quickly feel exhausted.

By contrast, Alexandra Wulf’s biography is a wonderful tonic. It smoothly narrates Humboldt’s adventures and insights and deftly interweaves the story with an account of his impact on others, such as Goethe, Jefferson, Darwin, and Thoreau. Humboldt was not only the greatest scientific traveler ever (said Darwin) but the most inspired influencer of them all (says I).    

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, two astronomers set out from Paris, one due north towards Dunkerque, the other south towards Barcelona. Their task was to measure the length of the meridian arc between these two towns and, ultimately, to determine the precise length of the new-fangled meter, meant to serve as a unit of measurement “for all people, for all time.”

This may appear to be a humdrum task. It was anything but. At that time, royal heads fell, armies sprung from the ground, and money went into hiding. The author is as painstaking about historical detail as his protagonists were about their measurements. He left out no provincial archive and no calculation scribbled on a margin.

The outcome reads like a novel, splendidly conveying the quixotic flavor of the enterprise and the Sisyphus-like dedication of its protagonists.  

This book is a novel, unabashedly. It describes the lives of our old friend Humboldt and the math genius Karl Friedrich Gauss, culminating in their 1828 encounter in Berlin.

This meeting is a well-documented fact. Not everything else is. Daniel Kehlmann takes his liberties with history. He even boasts of his leger-de-main, like Alexandre Dumas.

The overall outcome is splendidly funny and uncannily wise. The cap-stone irony is that the most implausible episodes of the book are not the ones that the author invented.    

Again, fiction that is based on facts–but in this novel, the facts take over and engulf the reader in an apocalyptic tornado.

The book has an obsessive quality. Most of it deals with the life of the legendary mathematician John von Neumann, known as the “father of the computer,” who switched from pure mathematics to nuclear destruction, artificial life, and various other games.

Labatut’s admirably well-researched saga explores the inhuman face of science and the demonic aspects of progress “for which there is no cure” (copyright John von Neumann). A technological maelstrom to give Edgar Allan Poe the creeps, the book shows that romantic science has come a long way since Dr. Frankenstein.