Book Club Edition: Cosmos Award–winning author Dava Sobel

Mat Kaplan: Hello again everyone. I'm Mat Kaplan, senior communications advisor at The Planetary Society and former host of Planetary Radio. Here's the third in our new monthly series that brings the best of The Planetary Society Book Club to PlanRad listeners.

This month's guest is very special to us. Dava Sobel is so much more than a science communicator. Galileo's Daughter, A More Perfect Heaven, Longitude, The Glass Universe, Planets, and her most recent masterpiece, The Elements of Marie Curie. I've read and recommend all of them. Each is a jewel of nonfiction literature. Stories told by an author who loves science and the wonder it generates.

As you'll hear, it was when Dava partnered with the society to present a dramatic reading from Galileo's Daughter that I first met and interviewed her. That was in 2003. She would join me on Planetary Radio many more times. It was just last June that we shared another wonderful conversation with her. That was hours before she received the Society's Cosmos Award at a Washington DC banquet.

I highly recommend listening to that interview as an introduction to the one you'll hear in moments. We've got the link on the show page at planetary.org/radio. I spent yet another wonderful hour with Dava in August. This live online conversation capped our book club's month-long celebration of all her work, and it's the one we are proud to share with you now. It all started, at least my involvement with you, back with Galileo's Daughter, not when the book came out in 20... Wait a minute here.

Dava Sobel: 1999.

Mat Kaplan: 1999, thank you. Which was, what? Four years after you published Longitude.

Dava Sobel: Right.

Mat Kaplan: Which I also have to say something. In fact, I'll say it right now. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, a winner of the British Book of the Year Award. But I did not know until today you were also awarded, get this, the Harrison Medal from the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers. Congratulations.

Dava Sobel: Thank you.

Mat Kaplan: And that was an award named after the central character in the book, right?

Dava Sobel: Yes. Well, it's a rather new award or was then. Everybody loves the name of the Clockmakers Guild in England. That is how they are known, the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers.

Mat Kaplan: Absolutely wonderful. I was delighted by that book, but I didn't read that until after I read Galileo's Daughter. And then you and I met because you consented to prepare that special stage presentation or staged reading of portions of the book, which we presented on stage at the Pasadena Playhouse under the direction of our own Bob Picardo, Robert Picardo, and starring John Rhys-Davies and Linda Purl as Galileo and his daughter, Sister Maria Celeste, which was a wonderful evening. And I got to talk to you a few minutes before the performance backstage, which was delightful, and would be followed by many other conversations. This is only the latest in that long line.

Dava Sobel: I remember it well.

Mat Kaplan: I assume that you approve that you had a good time that evening?

Dava Sobel: Oh, it was wonderful. Yes. Thank you.

Mat Kaplan: I want to back up a moment before we start to talk more about some of your work. Here is just a couple of lines from an article that I wrote for The Planetary Society website. The Planetary Society's board of directors recognize that Dava's writing stands as testament to the power of storytelling in science.

She shows us that the universe is explained not just through equations and experiments, but through human stories, making distant historical figures breathe again and allowing us to see science through their eyes and feel their wonder. These gifts made her an ideal recipient of the Cosmos Award. And you are only the sixth recipient. Does that strike home for you that reaching for the human element that is so much a part of all science?

Dava Sobel: Very much so because it troubles me the way scientists are so often presented in the media, which is as barely more than a robot, and science itself as a collection of facts when, as you know, science is an extremely creative enterprise and scientists are nothing if not passionate about what they do.

Mat Kaplan: Certainly true in every single scientist, every good scientist that I have talked to, and like you, I've talked to many. Let's talk about Galileo's Daughter because as much as I enjoyed Longitude and it was responsible, as I've told you, for my making a side trip to Greenwich, the Royal Observatory while I was there. By the way, did you hear that there is now a brand new Astronomer Royal and for the first time it's a woman?

Dava Sobel: I don't think I did know that.

Mat Kaplan: It just happened.

Dava Sobel: Who is it?

Mat Kaplan: It was just announced. And of course, I'm terrible at names. I'll have to look it up. It's someone I had on a panel at the Ravinia Festival outside Chicago last year. She's a wonderful choice. And for the first time in all these centuries, it's a woman.

Dava Sobel: Yes. Glory be.

Mat Kaplan: And that's a great segue into so much of your work, including Galileo's Daughter, because while it is largely the story of Galileo, who I thought I knew pretty well before I read the book and learned that I did not, it's also the story of his brilliant daughter who did so much, became so much a part of this story even though she spent all of her time sequestered in that convent that he put her in when she was very young.

Dava Sobel: 13.

Mat Kaplan: Along with her sister, right?

Dava Sobel: Right.

Mat Kaplan: There is a wonderful surprise at the end of the book having to do with Maria Celeste. I won't give it away because there are people out there I'm sure who haven't read the book, but I'll just say, there is a terrific surprise waiting for you if you take on Galileo's Daughter. And why wouldn't you? It was the number one New York Times bestseller and a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

As I told you earlier today, one of the revelations in this, because I get caught up in those popular images of scientists sometimes as well, especially ones of long ago, was Galileo's humor, which could be absolutely wicked. And that example that I gave you, which is from very early in the book, he of course faced a lot of opponents, a lot of supposedly learned men. And I guess they were all men, who disagreed with his findings, even though they hadn't actually done any observations of their own.

You said that learning of the death of one such opponent in December of 1610, Galileo wished aloud that the professor, having ignored the Medicean stars during his time on earth, might now encounter them en route to heaven. Very, very good. And would you please explain the Medicean stars?

Dava Sobel: Yes. They're the moons of Jupiter. When Galileo made that discovery, he very candidly dedicated them to the young Cosimo de' Medici. It was a good ploy because it got him a job at the Medici Court. Cosimo himself, I think originally Galileo wanted to call them the Cosmian stars, but then it got changed to Medicean.

Mat Kaplan: We are getting some comments. Thank you, Adrian, for letting us know it was astronomer professor Michele Dougherty, who was the first woman in the over 350-year history to appointed the UK's Astronomer Royal.

Dava Sobel: That's great news.

Mat Kaplan: Yeah. Michele, congratulations. I've gone to the chat and please keep this stuff coming everybody. Becky, thank you to you for providing that as well. Dustin Flam says, "I loved Longitude. Is there a story you uncovered during research that didn't make it into the book but still sticks with you?"

Dava Sobel: Yes. It was the story, I don't think it's in the book of La Salle, who discovered wonderful things in the Americas but then had to go back to France. When he wanted to return to his discovery, he couldn't find it because he couldn't determine his longitude and his men followed him around for a very long time and that expedition came to a miserable end.

Mat Kaplan: While we're back on the topic of Longitude, we should say, please can you give just a quick thumbnail synopsis of what this was all about, this huge challenge?

Dava Sobel: What is this book about really? People still ask me. It's really about the difficulty of determining position at sea once you have lost sight of land. And for hundreds of years this was impossible to do because there is nothing in the heavens that holds still to give you a reading the way the North Star, in the Northern Hemisphere at least, will tell you your latitude.

Early on, certainly by the 16th century, people understood what you would need in order to be able to tell you your longitude, and that would be knowing the time where you were and knowing the time at a point of known longitude. How could you do that? Well, theoretically, you could have two timekeepers. One would carry the home port time with you and the other, you would reset every day by making observations of the sun, you could get your noonday reading.

And then you'd have this comparison, which would translate to a geographical distance because the earth is 360 degrees around, and it goes around every 24 hours. So 15 degrees of longitude for every hour of time, but there were no clocks or watches at that time that could keep time well enough for that to work.

So the other idea was that you could figure out something going on in the heavens and predict what time that would happen over a place of no longitude, and then make that same observation wherever you were and note your local time and then again, you have a time difference to compute. So in the 18th century, both of those methods became feasible and the timekeeper solution was a whole lot easier to work. It was just so difficult to build the clocks, and that's what Harrison did.

Mat Kaplan: And John Harrison, he developed the early ones that looked like Rube Goldberg devices. Hope people get that reference. And eventually ends up-

Dava Sobel: They're beautiful.

Mat Kaplan: They're gorgeous machines. To stand in front of them, because you can stand right in front of their glass cases at the Royal Observatory, and then eventually end up with something the size of a pocket watch, it's absolutely glorious. And you'd think, "Oh, of course, the king and the entire court was immediately at his feet because he'd accomplished this." Not so much.

Dava Sobel: No.

Mat Kaplan: And that's much of the story of the book. It's Harrison's fight-

Dava Sobel: It's one thing to solve the problem and then it's another thing to convince people that you actually have solved it when it isn't the solution that was expected.

Mat Kaplan: Wonderful story, and great that you were able to bring this name that so few people are familiar with, John Harrison, to light around the world. Craig says, "I read The Planets. It was so beautifully written. I actually did fall in love with the planets all over again. So many lovely passages. The one that jumps out for me is, 'The parched moon pulls at earth's seas as though jealous of them.' I will be reading the rest of Dava's work now."

Dava Sobel: Oh, thank you. I really loved working on that book. That was really great fun for me.

Mat Kaplan: The full name of the book is The Planets: A discourse on the discovery, science, history and mythology of the planets in our solar system with a chapter devoted to each of the celestial spheres. By the way, Dava-

Dava Sobel: Wait, wait, wait. That isn't the title.

Mat Kaplan: No? All I know is The Planets-

Dava Sobel: Unfortunately, the title was just The Planets, which was not my title. My title was How The Planets Came to Earth, which is really what the book is about.

Mat Kaplan: That's wonderful. Why didn't they use that?

Dava Sobel: I don't know, editorial judgment.

Mat Kaplan: I will tell everybody if you have not read The Planets, it is a gorgeous book. You do get those beautiful illustrations, which are wonderful.

Dava Sobel: Which are all by Lynette Cook, and that was another lovely experience working with her. She was really known as a space artist then. She's gone on to do other things now, but that was a joyous collaboration.

Mat Kaplan: There are two quotes that you use to open the book. One of them, of course, from our founder, I'll read it. This is from Carl Sagan in The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective. "In all the history of mankind, there will be only one generation that will be first to explore the Solar System, one generation for which, in childhood, the planets are distant and indistinct discs moving through the night sky, and for which, in old age, the planets are places, diverse new worlds in the course of exploration."

Dava Sobel: That still gives me the chills when I hear it.

Mat Kaplan: I feel so fortunate to have been part of that generation.

Dava Sobel: Me too.

Mat Kaplan: Because I remember reading my astronomy books that I would take out of the storefront library in elementary school that said, "Yeah, who knows if we'll ever visit the planets." And we'll probably never be able to tell if there are planets going around other stars, and now we know that there are more planets than stars in the galaxy. It's a wonderful time. It has been a wonderful time to be alive.

Dava Sobel: Up until recently. Yes.

Mat Kaplan: Yeah, we might talk a little bit about that as well. The other thing that you can find throughout the book, The Planets, is poetry. Wonderful selections. Here is the one that you use to open the book from Diane Ackerman, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral, "At night I lie awake in the ruthless unspoken, knowing that planets come to life, bloom, and die away, like day lilies opening one after another in every nook and cranny of the universe." That's another goosebump one.

Dava Sobel: You bet. Yeah. I'm happy to say Diane's book of planet poems has been out of print for a long time, but it is being reissued, I think this year. If not this year, early next year.

Mat Kaplan: That might make it a terrific selection for our club, for this book club.

Dava Sobel: Oh, yes.

Mat Kaplan: So I've just put a star next to that and we will look into it.

Dava Sobel: Highly recommended.

Mat Kaplan: Excellent, thank you. There's a longer passage from The Planets that I want to read. Your words, my voice, but I hope to do it justice, but I have to ask you up front, first of all, do you still have a planet fetish?

Dava Sobel: Well, yeah. Yeah. What can I say? I have various little... I don't know how much you can see behind me. I brought Galileo along, but I have a lot of little planet models.

Mat Kaplan: What was Galileo holding there in his hand?

Dava Sobel: It's a telescope.

Mat Kaplan: Of course. First to point a spyglass at the sky. Here's the passage that I wanted to read to you, and it's because you do say in the book that you have a planet fetish. Here is the opening of the chapter about the Moon, Earth's Moon, our own Moon, capital M, that you titled Lunacy. "During the glory days of the Apollo project, a young astronomer who analyzed Moon rocks at a university laboratory fell in love with my friend, Carolyn, and risked his job and the national security to give her a quantum of Moon dust. 'Where is it? Let me see,' I demanded at this news. But she answered quietly, 'I ate it.' After a pause, she added, 'There was so little,' as though that explained everything. I was furious.

"In an instant, I had dropped from the giddy height of discovering the Moon right there in Carolyn's apartment to realizing she had eaten it all without leaving a crumb for me. In reverie, I saw the Moon dust caress Carolyn's lips like a lover's kiss. As it entered her mouth, it ignited on contact with her saliva to shoot sparks that lodged in her every cell. Crystalline and alien, it illuminated her body's dark recesses like pixie powder, thrumming the senseless tune of a wind chime through her veins. By its sacred presence, it changed her very nature. Carolyn, the Moon goddess, she had mated herself to the Moon somehow via this act of incorporation, and that was what made me so jealous."

Dava Sobel: That is a true story. Thank you.

Mat Kaplan: Of course. I assume no less. I read that in part, first of all, because it's about as sensual a passage as you'll find in any book about astronomy. In addition-

Dava Sobel: Now that's a distinction, Mat. Thank you. Thank you.

Mat Kaplan: There you go. There ought to be an award specifically for that [inaudible 00:20:34].

Dava Sobel: Well, I tell you, one of my favorite reviews, I think it was New Scientist about Longitude, said, "Ms. Sobel has apparently done the impossible and made horology sexy."

Mat Kaplan: I totally agree, absolutely. But I also read that passage because it's such a good example of your prose that fills not just this book, but all of your books.

Dava Sobel: Thank you.

Mat Kaplan: Let's jump back to this book, Galileo's Daughter. It seems to me that a central theme that you address in this book, and that Galileo was forced to address, whether he wanted to or not, you described it in one point as the battle lines that he saw forming between science and scripture. And I would just maybe expand that to between science and belief or maybe science and dogma. You can modify that as you wish. And you showed that Galileo saw no conflict between these two treasures of humankind. Is that how you feel about it?

Dava Sobel: I think it's possible to have both, as he did. He lived in a universe that was Catholic and both his daughters were nuns. That was the big surprise. That was the inspiration for that book. Because from what I had learned about Galileo in school, I assumed that he was not a man of faith, but it was much more interesting to discover that he'd actually done everything he did as a believing Catholic.

And I'm not Catholic myself, but I found that fascinating. And the plight of his daughter to be a nun at the time he was on trial for heresy. All of those things just seemed yeasty, rich. And then her letters. Her letters are magnificent, so I wanted to be able to present them.

Mat Kaplan: That character of Maria Celeste, this brilliant woman. You can only wonder what her potential might've been had she had the opportunity to stay with her father and maybe even follow in his footsteps because she was obviously fascinated by his work. And didn't she help... She transcribed some of the work for him, didn't she?

Dava Sobel: Yes.

Mat Kaplan: Fascinating.

Dava Sobel: An amanuensis at times.

Mat Kaplan: And just the first of many, many women whose stories you've documented across the years. We'll come to Marie Curie before we finish this conversation, but I think of The Glass Universe and those wonderful women who finally, now, partly thanks to you, have begun to receive some of the recognition that they earned when they were doing their work in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Dava Sobel: Yeah. There are even a couple of streets in Cambridge that have been named for two of them.

Mat Kaplan: Oh, that's great. Back to Galileo's Daughter. When the church did its ruling, and it's so interesting the story, because early in the story, it looks like even the Pope, who's kind of Galileo's buddy, the new Pope, they all think he's brilliant and they like his work.

Dava Sobel: He was brilliant. Yeah.

Mat Kaplan: Yes. And slowly things turn against him, largely for political reasons, and that when finally the church, the Pope ruled against the Copernican view of a sun-centered solar system, how it stymied science primarily in Italy. You talk in the book about how scientists, natural philosophers, as they were known, in other nations pitied their colleagues in Italy, but their work went on.

Dava Sobel: Well, that was one of Galileo's arguments that if they banned Copernicus, then the Protestants would figure out how the universe worked and the church would be embarrassed.

Mat Kaplan: I was going to say, with apologies to Barbara Tuchman, do you maybe detect a distant mirror in this story of a time in which science [inaudible 00:25:02]?

Dava Sobel: It's such a great title. It's a great title.

Mat Kaplan: Do do you see relevance for the current day in this time when the powers that be were saying-

Dava Sobel: Oh, boy, do I. Yes, yes. Galileo is still used in trying to make a case for science. We are 400 years past Galileo, 100 years past the Scopes trial, and where are we? Going with the decimation of funding for science, whole agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency. You know the news as well as I do. I can't go there.

Mat Kaplan: Sadly true. All right, let's go to a somewhat happier part. Something about the book that really, it made me appreciate Isaac Newton even more, though Galileo anticipated so much of what he would build on. That was pretty clear, his studies of motion, even ignoring his study of the sky and what he discovered there. It's absolutely fascinating.

Dava Sobel: Even the concept of relativity. I love that section in the dialogue where he talks about having people on a ship in the cabin and having a fish in a bowl or some insects flying and you can't tell whether the ship is moving or standing still, that all of those motions will look the same.

Mat Kaplan: And this goes directly to what Einstein credited for his beginning to think about relativity being in a falling elevator.

Dava Sobel: Exactly. It sounds like the falling elevator, a thought experiment.

Mat Kaplan: Fascinating. Another one that struck me was that Copernicus who realized that, "Okay, the planets are moving against the stars, which look immobile because they're so far away." But it was Galileo who then, I learned from your book, said, "You know what? I bet someday we're going to have telescopes powerful enough that we'll be able to do the parallax calculation and figure out how far those stars are." And it happened 200 years later. He was 200 years ahead of himself. And this happened.

Dava Sobel: I don't remember that he said that.

Mat Kaplan: Yes, it's right there. It's in the book.

Dava Sobel: Okay. I [inaudible 00:27:42].

Mat Kaplan: Well, you didn't mention the 200 years, but you did say, of course, it came to pass. There's just one other really striking observation that I have to mention before we move on. Because it was a shock to learn, since I haven't read my Aristotle, I'm sorry, I'm embarrassed to say, that Aristotle didn't think that mathematics could be applied to the study of nature, which just seems so basic, a misunderstanding.

And that Galileo refuted both through his experiments and through his arguments. And there's this great quote that you have in the book, "There will be opened a gateway and a road to a large and excellent science, he predicted, into which minds more piercing than mine, shall penetrate to recesses still deeper." Why is that?

Dava Sobel: Yeah, I love that. Yeah. That sense of nobody finishes science. You make your contribution knowing that it's not complete and others will continue it after you.

Mat Kaplan: But it's also so difficult to believe that for all of those years, thousands of years, well, a thousand or more years, that there wasn't the connection made. Now, of course, it's like a cliché, mathematics, the language of science.

Dava Sobel: Do the math, right? Yeah.

Mat Kaplan: Right. Exactly. Let's see what's coming in from people before we move on a little bit. David says, "Galileo's Daughter was my first experience with Ms. Sobel's work. I have read many of her other works. I was fortunate to meet her at a DPS, Division of Planetary Sciences meeting at which she was doing research for her planet's book. So you were at at least one DPS meeting.

Dava Sobel: Oh, I was at several. I was at enough of them for people to start saying to me, "Are you still working on that book?" Yeah.

Mat Kaplan: Talk about your process. You don't turn these out every year.

Dava Sobel: Oh, no. No, no.

Mat Kaplan: There's so much work that goes on.

Dava Sobel: It's slow. It's slow. Yeah. There's a lot of research and then there's a lot of thinking about how to frame the story, especially with the planets because it's not really a story. The obvious approach would be to treat each planet perhaps in the same way, how things about it were learned, how it entered historical knowledge and maybe associate each planet with a particular scientist. But I knew I wanted to write a book about the planets, but that just bored me.

I couldn't see that that would be interesting enough to write or to read because there are already hundreds of books like that. So what could I do that would be more engaging? And the thought that helped me was everybody knows the names of the planets, even people who are not the least bit interested in astronomy. Everybody knows the names of the planets. Why? Well, they learn about them in mythology, they learn about them in astrology, science fiction. I bet there are enough of those avenues to have one for each planet and be able to talk about the planet in the language of that viewpoint.

Mat Kaplan: But you also brought such romance to these descriptions of these neighboring worlds.

Dava Sobel: As I said, I had a good time. Yeah. The one chapter I worried about was the Jupiter chapter because it's called Astrology. Carl Sagan had already died when I was working on this, but of course, one of his crusades was against the demon haunted world and kind of any pseudoscientific belief.

And I thought, "What would he say to me?" Because it starts off really talking in astrology lingo and talking about Galileo who had to work as an astrologer at times, as did Kepler. So I consoled myself that since it was for the purpose of presenting the real science, that he would forgive me.

Mat Kaplan: I suspect he would. I'm almost convinced. That'd be a good question to ask Ann Druyan someday, I think, but I'm sure she would agree. Dava Sobel has much more to share with us after the break. Please stay with us.

Danielle Gunn: Hi, I'm Danielle Gunn, chief communications officer at The Planetary Society. We're proud to support International Observe the Moon Night NASA's annual celebration of our nearest neighbor in space. This event brings together sky watchers, families, students, and communities worldwide to share in the wonder of the moon.

Whether you attend a local gathering, host one yourself, or simply step outside to look up, you'll be part of a global movement to connect with our moon. International Observe the Moon Night takes place on and around Saturday, October 4th. Explore activities, download custom moon maps and find events near you at moon.nasa.gov/observe. However, you choose to participate outdoors, online or from home, you're invited to celebrate the moon with the world.

Mat Kaplan: Let me share some more with you from some of our members here in the member community from Kareem, "Carl Sagan, whom I met while I was a student was a visionary devoted family man. His daughter, Sasha, has also become a communicator like her parents." In fact, she was my guest on Planetary Radio. We featured her book.

"In your own experience writing about Galileo's Daughter and exploring family legacies in science, what do you think is the deeper significance of these familial connections?" He says, "I have to say a major part of my passion for astronomy is due to my late big brothers who studied art, physics and astronomy and inspired my passions in those topics."

Dava Sobel: What a lucky thing to have happened to you. I think those things are tremendously important. I definitely was encouraged in my interest in science by my mother, just by her interest. She knew all the constellations, she took me to watch a partial eclipse one morning before school. I think having that kind of family connection is extremely important.

Mat, you mentioned we're going to talk about Madame Curie at some point. Her family story, she and her husband were scientists together and had two children, and their older daughter followed her mother into the lab and also was a Nobel Prize winner, and then the daughter's two children also became scientists. So that's a real dynasty.

Mat Kaplan: And her other daughter accomplished in her own way in science, right?

Dava Sobel: Yes. But not a scientist. Yep.

Mat Kaplan: David adds, "I'm currently reading A More Perfect Heaven on a tablet." A More Perfect Heaven. The correct full title for that one, I think I have this one, A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos. How does one get the chance to see... I guess we could read it, but it's my firm opinion that plays should be seen more than read. You wrote a play, right? And the Sun Stood Still.

Dava Sobel: Right. So the play was really the impetus for the book. When I first learned about Rheticus, the person who visited Copernicus and convinced him to finally publish the book he'd been writing all his life, I thought it would make a great play. This was back in 1973. And then I think I tried to think about it, but I really didn't know how to write a play. And about 30 years later, I still didn't know how, but I was determined to do it.

And then the play became the center of the book because my idea for the play was that it would be a great vehicle for a university theater department. And I was preparing all the supporting documentation so that when the play was done by the theater department, the language departments could be involved, the European history could be involved, theological studies. There are many, many aspects to Copernicus's story. And my publisher said, "Well, you should put all that together and make this a book instead of a play. Give the whole background story up to the time of their meeting." Because the meeting is historical fact. It's just what transpired in the meeting that no one knows. And then they were together for two years. So that's the play. And then pick up the story from the publication of the book and what happened afterwards. So the play appears in the book, but I knew when the book came out that the play really couldn't stand up on its own feet. It wasn't dynamic enough.

But when I was on my book tour in most cities, a couple of local actors were always willing to come and read a scene or two from the play. And the theater company in Boulder, Colorado did a fantastic job, and I went back to them and asked if they'd be willing to give me a workshop to try to improve the play. And they got a grant, I think it was the National Endowment for the Humanities Grant. Those were the days. And we had a week-long workshop.

And on the first day, the director pointed out to me that the play had an extraneous character, that there was one character who never interacted with Copernicus, and that if I got rid of him, the whole focus would become clearer. It was such good advice, I never stopped thanking him. So I rewrote the play, and it was published separately, but more importantly, that theater company in Boulder gave a world premiere, and it ran for about a month. That was just so exciting to really see it on stage.

Mat Kaplan: That's wonderful. I'd love to have that opportunity someday.

Dava Sobel: I think somewhere I have a DVD of the play.

Mat Kaplan: Oh, here's a couple more comments. Michael says, "Just noticed this read," and I think he's talking about The Planets, "is approaching its 20th anniversary," which must be about right because it was in 2005 that you joined me on Planetary Radio. Actually, it was a show that came out on Halloween 2005 to talk about the book.

Dava Sobel: Yes. That's when the book was published, October of 2005.

Mat Kaplan: There you go.

Dava Sobel: That's right.

Mat Kaplan: Not the first [inaudible 00:40:06].

Dava Sobel: It's the 20th anniversary.

Mat Kaplan: Happy anniversary.

Dava Sobel: Thank you.

Mat Kaplan: We've heard from Becky already. She's added, "I'm a scientist and a writer, so my passion is trying to increase communication skills for scientists. What one piece of advice would you give scientists about their writing?" Great question.

Dava Sobel: It is a great question. But when scientists write for scientific publications, they have to meet the expectations of those publications, and it discourages them from presenting their work in a more creative way, and I don't know what to do about that. Some scientists really are able to communicate with a wider public. Certainly, Carl Sagan could do that. I have a few others I could name who have that ability, although they may not have the time or the motivation.

Sagan used to say that if you receive public funding, you should spend maybe 10% of your time telling the public what you were doing with their money, which is a great idea. I also thought it was really interesting that Alan Alda, who some number of years, hosted a television program. I think it was called Explorations, in which he presented real scientific content and interviewed scientists. But he set up a program at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, teaching young scientists communication skills based on what actors do when they improvise.

And they actually held workshops, and you could see the before and after how these young researchers talked about their work before they had the improvisation class and then afterward. One thing, when I was teaching science writing, I always urged the students to think of an audience of one, just try to communicate what you are saying or writing about to one other person. And that helps you state it more clearly, especially a particular person, someone you know, because you would know how to make it interesting to that person, how to shape it to that person's understanding.

Mat Kaplan: You have given us a wonderful segue into that comment from Arnold that I said I would get back to. Here it is. "In Mat's interview with Dava, prior to the 2025 Cosmos Award, the one that was aired on Planetary Radio, Dava revealed that she wrote Longitude for one person, her mother, to achieve a balance between science, complexity and emotion. Marie Curie, that book," which we're about to get to, "was written to Harry Corbin and Van Samuel to future feminists." That's in quotes, because that was your dedication. "Was this a mirror image attempt to balance the complexity of femininity with the contributions of science?" Arnold says, "I've read both. Now that The Glass Universe about the ladies of the Harvard Observatory is written to a group, ladies who sustain Dava, it has me wondering, as I start to read it, looking for a comment."

Dava Sobel: The dedication is often to the person I'm thinking of. I really did write Longitude for my mother. The Madame Curie book, those two young men the book is dedicated to are my grandchildren, and they're only one and two. So I couldn't really be telling the story to them. Nevertheless, what I was reaching for there was the sense that Madame Curie had, which was you can be a woman and defend women's rights while really having wonderful, loving relationships with men and not having any misandrous thoughts or feelings.

Mat Kaplan: Let's talk about your most recent book. Here it is, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science just published last year. We talk about it in somewhat greater detail than we'll be able to this evening in that Planetary Radio conversation. Again, you can find it on the website or in your favorite podcast player. But I found this to be just as revealing and fascinating and exciting a read, as beautiful a read as the Galileo book.

Dava Sobel: Even though it wasn't about astronomy.

Mat Kaplan: Even though it wasn't about astronomy.

Dava Sobel: But there are astronomical connections.

Mat Kaplan: Yes, absolutely.

Dava Sobel: Which I don't really talk about in the book, but it was so interesting to be in a time when there was a periodic table of the elements, but it was incomplete. Her life had so much to do with filling it in and figuring out the structure of the atom, the source of the elements. Of course, now we know that they come from the stars.

Mat Kaplan: Yes. Other than hydrogen, which was around. Well, even it was not there at the beginning.

Dava Sobel: The stars come from the hydrogen.

Mat Kaplan: Yeah, exactly. Those of you who've read the book know this to be the case. Those of you who haven't read it, you don't know Marie Curie, Madame Curie. You need to read this book to find out about this absolutely amazing woman. Just as one example that I was not aware of, would you talk about what Marie felt compelled to do for her adopted country, France, during World War I?

Dava Sobel: Yeah. She knew that X-ray would completely transform the treatment of wounded soldiers, and she also knew that the technology was new enough that it wasn't widespread, and only the largest hospitals had it. Only some doctors knew about it. So she created a mobile X-ray unit. She got someone to give her a car, and she outfitted it with the equipment and started driving it around to hospitals first in Paris. But what she really wanted to do was take it out to the field hospitals and as closest to the front as the army would let her go.

And over the course of the war, she personally outfitted 19 vehicles like that and did learn to drive. So she didn't need a separate driver. Would drive them to places. It was important to get close to the battlefront because if you had to transport the wounded to a hospital, then it took time and the wounds would get infected and it would be too late.

And so it was not only taking the X-rays, but convincing the doctors of how powerful this tool was, and then teaching them how to interpret the X-rays so that they were useful. And as if that weren't enough, she also created a course for French women to become X-ray technicians in a six-week course where she taught electricity, X-ray theory and practice and human anatomy. And she trained 150 French women during the war to help carry out this kind of work.

Mat Kaplan: And then there were all those other men and women who she brought into her laboratory, made great demands of, but trained, and they went on to become some of the leading scientists in their fields. Fascinating. And it's a story of romance, and I highly recommend it. I want to thank you. It has been a tremendous pleasure and truly an honor to be able to spend some time with you again.

Dava Sobel: I feel the same way. It's great fun to talk to you and share so many interests, and I really appreciate it.

Mat Kaplan: I'll be back next month with my wonderful society colleague, Kate Howells. Kate has just published Moons: The Mysteries and Marvels of Our Solar System. It's great. And it's our October selection for The Planetary Society Book Club. Want to join the club and participate in our live interactions? Become a member of The Planetary Society. When you do, there's so much more you'll be helping us to create and accomplish. Visit planetary.org/join to learn more.

Planetary Radio is a production of The Planetary Society. Our associate producers are Rae Paoletta and Mark Hilverda. Casey Dreier is the host of our monthly Space Policy Edition. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor.

The society's member community is led by Ambre Trujillo. The producer and host of Planetary Radio is Sarah Al-Ahmed. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Pieter Schlosser. I'm Mat Kaplan, your host of the Planetary Radio Book Club Edition. And until next time, ad astra.