Solar Eclipse - Softcover

"The history of eclipses," Thomas Crump writes, "is essentially the story of how humankind has reacted to them". A scholar in both anthropology and mathematics, Crump's intention is to write a book about eclipses "for those ... who are more interested in people than stars". To discover how early civilisations came to understand eclipses is to understand the changing role of astronomy in the ancient world. The fact that so infrequent and ephemeral a phenomenon entered folk consciousness at all says something about the development of language, history and calculation. Fascination with eclipses has been pivotal in our attempts to understand the world, even as late as 1919, when solar eclipse photographs proved Einstein's contention that heavy bodies like the sun distort light rays. But the pivot of this present book lies in the late 16th century, as Johannes Kepler drew astronomy out of the purview of geometry and into the realm of physics. Science, Crump points out, never serves itself: it always has a master. The moment astronomy was liberated from astrological neuroses of monarchs and could serve instead the navigational needs of the nascent European empires, the modern age of astronomy could begin. This is a fascinating anthropological study, spiked with some modest mathematics, and sustained by a tremendous sense of history and scale. --Simon Ings