Selected Criticism
Sexism and the Stars
Science, March 20 2020
In the early 20th century, astronomers believed in a uniformity principle that held that all objects in the universe were made of the same elements, in approximately the same amounts. In 1925, however, Cecilia Payne, a Ph.D. student at Harvard, discovered that stars are composed of a million times more hydrogen than was previously assumed. But because she was young and female, the scientific community rejected her findings. It would take several decades before Payne-Gaposchkin received the recognition she was due. In What Stars Are Made Of, using compact and skillful prose, Donovan Moore charts Payne-Gaposchkin’s scientific life from grade school standout to world-class astronomer.
Neil deGrasse Tyson Explores the Symbiosis Between War and Astrophysics
New York Times Book Review, November 12 2018
During the 2003 National Space Symposium, a scientific conference held three weeks after President George W. Bush initiated Operation Iraqi Freedom, signs of enthusiasm for the new war could be seen everywhere: in the weapons crowding the hall, in the CNN war coverage that filled the screens and in the applause that broke out every time the name of a weapon made by a company at the symposium was mentioned. This wasn’t “a bit of arms trading on the side,” Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang write in “Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military.” Without the Space Symposium and “all its predecessors and counterparts across culture and time,” Tyson realized, “there would be no astronomy, no astrophysics, no astronauts, no exploration of the solar system and barely any comprehension of the cosmos.”
photo by Miller Mobley
Exploring Exoplanets
Science, November 17 2017
Thirty years ago, the idea of planets orbiting other suns was relegated to the realm of science fiction. So much has changed since then that the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson recently asserted that not only do such planets likely “outnumber the sum of all sounds and words ever uttered by every human who has ever lived” but that “[t]o declare that Earth must be the only planet with life in the universe would be inexcusably bigheaded of us.”
The Women Who Mapped Heaven
Barnes & Noble Review, February 1 2017
Although there was no statistical excess of high-profile deaths in 2016, the year felt like a relentless march to the other side. One loss that affected me personally was the Christmas passing of astrophysicist Vera Rubin, the mother of cosmology. In the 1960s she became the first woman to use then-state-of-the-art Palomar Observatory, and her studies of galaxy rotations “clinched the case for dark matter,” wrote Princeton physicist Jeremiah Ostriker. Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard, argued that Rubin should have won the Nobel.
The Sun Spotters
Science, July 14 2017
In the summer of 1878, the United States was adjusting to post–Civil War unity. “Like an ungainly teenager after a growth spurt,” writes David Baron in American Eclipse, the country was “settling in to its larger, more muscular body, and it was beginning to exert its strength.”
The total solar eclipse that would sweep across the western states on 29 July of that year was an opportunity for the nation’s scientists to prove their prowess, both to themselves and to a Europe dismissive of the country’s scientific potential. In Britain, France, and Germany, private societies, government agencies, and public universities promoted scientific excellence, but science in a nonelitist democracy needed the support of the people.
Rovelli’s Sublime Physics
Los Angeles Review of Books, September 17 2016
“IMAGINE A BOX OF LIGHT,” Albert Einstein told Niels Bohr in 1930, continuing their argument of 20-odd years. If we let a single photon — a particle of light — escape from that box and we clock when it left, then we’ll know the time it was emitted. If we weigh the box before and after, we’ll know the photon’s energy, because E=mc^2. Knowing both time and energy definitively, however, was allegedly impossible, according to the theory Einstein himself proposed but never adopted: quantum mechanics. Einstein was particularly annoyed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, with its view of the world as a set of probabilities instead of definite things: “God does not play dice with the universe,” he famously quipped. His box-of-light thought experiment was intended to disprove the theory once and for all.
