Figuring Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Figuring

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Zusammenfassung von Figuring

Name: Figuring
Rating: 4.1 (74 reviews)
Author: Maria Popova

Maria Popova

An exploration of the surprising connections between historical figures

4.1 (74 Bewertungen)

23 Min.

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Frauengeschichten Geschichte der USA Europäische Geschichte

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Figuring
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What’s in it for me? Discover a world full of surprising connections.

We never know how far our words and deeds might travel. How could Johannes Kepler, the world’s first astrophysicist, have anticipated in 1603 that his allegorical story about a moon voyage would lay the groundwork for future science fiction? How could Maria Mitchell, America’s first female astronomer, have known that she would become an icon for women in the sciences when she was simply following her passion?

The truth is, our lives echo long after we’re gone, ringing out in myriad directions. In these blinks, we’ll follow these echoes and trace the lives of a number of historical figures, and discover how they interweave in often surprising ways.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

what Johannes Kepler foresaw about the Apollo mission;
how Maria Mitchell achieved fame as an astronomer; and
what Lord Byron’s daughter accomplished as a mathematician.

Human fates are interwoven, across time and space, in an ever-expanding web.

If you picture your own life story, and those of others, as straight lines, moving only forwards, then you have the wrong idea. In reality, our lives and collective histories branch out in myriad different directions, in an infinitely connected web. We intersect with other people and things in unimaginable ways.

One reason we overlook this complex web is that we fail to recall how we’re all fundamentally connected. Everything that exists is made of the same star stuff. Everything. From every idea that Albert Einstein had to the preservatives that keep his brain floating in its jar. From every cell of Galileo’s pointing finger to the molecules of gas and dust that form the rings of Jupiter. From the opening notes of Beethoven’s fifth symphony to the sound of a voice you love. All of it exploded into being with the Big Bang, from a single source, 13.8 billion years ago.

If we know this essential truth, why do we think of ourselves as completely distinct, separate, atomised? For instance, some of us become so focused on personal development that we forget that we are also shaped in important ways by other people in our lives. Indeed, the poet Walt Whitman knew how connected we are when he wrote: “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

Our great ideas and advancements, in art, science and philosophy, didn’t evolve separately, but through great webs of connectedness. Many of these connections are invisible and barely traced.

And many of the ideas that bloomed into revolutions or shifts of understanding first developed in obscurity, gestating over many ages, between different disciplines. Collecting like individual drops of water along different channels, they eventually made a great torrent.

This is best exemplified by the struggles for equality between races, genders, classes, and sexualities. Pioneers like the first American astronomer Maria Mitchell or early abolitionist Frederick Douglass sparked movements that, over the course of history, contributed to great change, affecting causes far beyond their own.

Through his scientific discoveries and his science fiction, Johannes Kepler shaped the future.

The life and work of Johannes Kepler, the world’s first astrophysicist, is striking in its own right. But the way his work in the 1600s would link up with other scientists and writers over the following centuries is equally remarkable.

Kepler’s astronomical discoveries fed into the future of many different scientific fields. At a time of widespread ignorance and superstition, he was one of the first adherents to Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the universe. He contributed key insights to the field of astronomy. For example, he was the first to suggest that the planets orbit the sun, not in circles, but in ellipses, the first to develop a scientific method of predicting eclipses, and the first to demonstrate that physical forces move the planets and stars in calculable paths through the night sky.

Her unique upbringing and surroundings allowed Maria Mitchell to become America’s first female astronomer.

Born on the island of Nantucket in 1818 into a family of Quakers, Maria Mitchell was a brilliant child captivated by the cosmos. But in the 1800s, science was still dominated by men. In order to become a serious astronomer, Mitchell had to fight an uphill battle.

But on the evening of October 1st, 1847, she made a discovery that would transform her life. Scouring the heavens with her beloved telescope that night, she spotted a tiny, brilliant speck moving across the sky – a new comet! She knew the cosmos like the back of her hand and she’d never noticed this bright little intruder before. Earlier that year, Europe’s chief patron of the sciences, the King of Denmark, had announced a prize for anyone who discovered a new comet. The victor would be awarded with a gold medal worth 20 ducats – a fortune back then.

Across the ages, many people of genius have considered beauty to be allied with truth.

The 19th century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning thought that there were different types of beauty: in the arts, obviously, but also in physics and in morals. They were all reflections of an essential truth about the universe. Throughout the ages, many have shared this belief.

Galileo, too, was someone who considered the truth he found in his science to be beautiful. He refuted the prevailing geocentric model of the universe that held that the God-created Earth was at the center of everything. He discovered the first evidence against the unscientific dogma of the time when he was observing the different phases of Venus. If the prevailing opinion had been correct, then Venus could not be illuminated from the vantage point of Earth, as that would have put it on the far side of the sun. But through his telescope Galileo could see Venus all aglow in dark space. And representing such a powerful, controversial truth, he found the planet all the more beautiful.

Throughout history, the truth of people’s amorous natures have always been more complex than the labels put on them.

In the 19th century, people who were deemed to have “irregular,” non-heteronormative relationships were sometimes described as “Uranian.” Derived from the name of the Greek goddess Aphrodite Urania, who was created out of the god Uranus’ testicles, Uranian referred to someone of the “third sex.” Today we’d recognize people described by this term, broadly speaking, as queer.

However, because of the strictures of the past, many people throughout history have concealed their natures from others and even from themselves, too. History is full of relationships that were never quite realized, or defy easy definition.

The meeting of literature and science was personified by mathematical prodigy Ada Lovelace.

The child of the Romantic poet Lord Byron and a mathematically brilliant aristocrat, Baroness Annabella Milbanke, Ada Lovelace, was born in 1815.

Byron and Milbanke’s marriage didn’t last long, however, after Byron was found to be having an affair with his half-sister, Augusta. Byron fled to Italy, then Greece.

Goethe left behind a surprising scientific legacy.

The famous German poet Goethe also considered himself a scientist. Like many of the other people we’ve met so far, the two facets of imagination and reason came together to form Goethe’s genius. Although he left his mark mainly on the world of literature, his scientific legacy is surprising.

For instance, he is partly responsible for the names for clouds we use today.

Even the most scientific minds are prone to the mystical in the face of mortality.

When James Gleick was composing his biography of Richard Feynman in 1988, he discovered a letter that upended the late physicist’s public persona. The world had known Feynman as a rationalist immune to unreason, yet the letter revealed a whole new, sentimental side to the sober scientist. To understand its origins, we need to travel back to Feynman’s youth.

As a teenager, Feynman had fallen in love with a girl called Arline, who was as passionate about philosophy as he was about math. They pondered a life of bliss together.

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Worum geht es in Figuring?

Figuring (2019) traces the intricate web that connects important figures from human history, from German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and inventor Nikola Tesla to America’s first female astronomer Maria Mitchell and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. These blinks pick up the tapestry of these different lives, trace the impact that they had on the course of history, and reveal the secret driving force that unites them all.

Bestes Zitat aus Figuring

No one ever knows, nor therefore has the grounds to judge, what goes on between two people...

—Maria Popova

Wer Figuring lesen sollte

Voracious readers across all genres
Poets who love science
Scientists who love poetry

Über den Autor

Maria Popova is a Bulgarian-born American author famous for her blog Brain Pickings, which features her diverse writing on books, art, philosophy, and culture. She has served as an MIT “Futures of Entertainment” Fellow, as the editorial director at the higher education social network Lore, and has written for The Atlantic, Wired UK, and The New York Times.

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