The Age of Wonder

Usually, when I think of the Romantic Age, I think of the art and literature of the time. But I love how this book depicts its science as a wide-open activity, full of the wonder, false starts, pleasures, and pitfalls of any creative activity.

I think every scientist in this book also wrote poetry; the vast majority of them took as a given the fact that aliens lived on other planets; scientific lectures were a form of popular entertainment, as were many discoveries: e.g., laughing gas, the first anesthesia, was used at parties to get high before it was used… show more.

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… show more.

This masterful book comprises ten stories of events that ushered in the modern scientific understanding of the world. While some of the ground covered feature widely known characters – Joseph Banks, William Herschel, Humphrey Davy – the book is full of surprising tales that, like a journey through time, reveal many curious facets about the long and winding roads to discoveries. For instance, it took many decades before the study of the curious effects of laughing gas eventually led to anesthetics, to the relief of innumerable patients since. This book is a wonderful way to learn about the history of… show more.