A Concise History of Solar and Stellar Physics , Jean-Louis Tassoul and Monique Tassoul Princeton U. Press, Princeton, NJ, 2004. $39.95 (282 pp.). ISBN 0-691-11711-X
Awareness of a scientific subfield’s history and principal players is disappearing from the minds of today’s researchers. In A Concise History of Solar and Stellar Physics, husband-and-wife team Jean-Louis and Monique Tassoul, both theoretical astrophysicists, wanted to rectify this troubling development for solar and stellar physics, disciplines broad enough to embrace such diverse fields as nuclear fusion and magnetohydrodynamics. The authors” historical journey spans nearly three millennia—from astronomy in ancient Greece and the Middle East to the 21st century.
The Tassouls” theoretical point of view works naturally for the earlier part of the book, which covers the days long before Galileo turned his telescope to the skies, when all observational astronomy relied on people’s keen eye-sight. The opening chapter on ancient astronomical ideas is marvelously written—the best I have read on the subject for many years. The authors present a real sense of the role of accidents in history, such as how Aristarchus’s heliocentric universe was overshadowed by Aristotle’s theory of a geocentric universe; that accident led to the Catholic Church’s uncompromising acceptance of the notion that Earth was at the center of everything. European astronomy was shaped by this belief until the time of Copernicus. The full account of Babylonian contributions to astronomy, and the little-known names of people associated with them, was gratifying for me and balanced out the European contributions also mentioned in the book.
The authors’ theoretical stance continues to make sense for later chapters in which they recount the period in the early 20th century, when astronomers were still groping for a satisfactory explanation of why the Sun shines, what its structure is, or whether blue stars evolve into red stars. Some surprises are in store: Who would have guessed that the conservation of energy was discovered not by a physicist but by a naval surgeon, Julius Robert Mayer, who was examining the blood of European sailors? Or that it was neither Herman Helmholtz nor Lord Kelvin who first thought of gravitational contraction as a mechanism to explain the Sun’s heat but was instead an obscure Scottish physicist named John Waterston, who had several papers rejected for publication? A Concise History of Solar and Stellar Physics does much to rescue such discoverers from oblivion and restore them to their rightful place in the canon of the history of astronomy.
Taking on the history of solar and stellar astronomy from 1900 onward is a mammoth task, and it is perhaps inevitable that the book has notable gaps and an obvious lack of emphasis on astronomical observations. For example, a single page is devoted to solar flares, with the barest mention (in a footnote) given to theories of how magnetic energy is converted to heat and particle acceleration. No mention is made of stellar flares, despite the topic’s venerable history, which dates to Bernard Lovell’s observations at Jodrell Bank Observatory in England. Readers will search in vain for many of the discoveries made by spacecraft. I found the omitted elucidation of the connection between fast solar wind streams and coronal holes derived from Skylab observations particularly distressing.
A historian’s view of a “golden age” is necessarily subjective. For the Tassouls, that age was 1940 through 1970. Was it so golden? To be sure, a great many discoveries, ranging from stellar population types—from Walter Baade’s work on globular clusters as he observed Los Angeles’s wartime-darkened skies—to pulsars were made during that period. But such discoveries continued well into the 1970s and beyond, with, for example, the dramatically improved understanding of solar and stellar coronae obtained from measurements with spacecraft instruments. Yet the Tassouls label the period from 1970 onward as the “Age of Specialization,” when no epoch-making monographs were written but only masses of multiauthored papers. Their take on that age is either pessimistic or realistic, depending on one’s point of view.
An attractive feature is the collection of portraits of many leading—and some lesser-known—astronomers, with short biographies that will delight many readers. The line drawings adequately illustrate points made in the text and are clear rather than elaborate. Like any good historical account, the book contains lavish, informative footnotes with up-to-date references. However, I question the need for many of the book’s several appendixes.
A Concise History of Solar and Stellar Physics is clearly not aimed at a general audience. Nonspecialists will be put off by some of the very detailed accounts, such as models of solar and stellar interiors. Yet the broad sweep of subjects that are covered will make the book useful to physics and astronomy undergraduates and others who wish to delve into the subject’s past and improve their scientific literacy.
