The Northern Lights

The book describes of the life of a quite remarkable Norwegian scientist who discovered the cause of the Aurora Borealis, invented the electro-magnetic canon, and created the process for synthesizing fertilizer. The book is an entertaining account, that falls short in its discussion of his science. As a personal account, his scientific journeys to Finmark in the heart of winter are an incredible demonstration of dedication to science.

This novel describes the man who unraveled mysteries of the brilliant Aurora Borealis and his challenging journeys against both society, and forces of nature. This Norwegian scientist by the name of Kristian Birkeland traveled through the harsh winter weathers of the mountains in Norway, to discover the secrets within the Northern Lights. Inspired by the beautiful moving curtains in the sky, Birkeland became set on researching the Lights, whether it meant risking his own life or even leaving his peaceful love life for work. Unfortunately, his devotion to the Research became his first priority, instead of his own health. Throughout the novel, Birkeland is chased by the large amount of funding that he needs, in order to set up his laboratory and his equipment for his Northern Lights Project. The government of Norway is constantly having tensions with its neighbor: Sweden, always with the apprehension of war. Therefore, the government is never willing to give enough funding to support the scientist's project. Lucy Jago takes us through Birkeland's adventures as if we were there with him through the harsh blizzards and storms. Jago paints the story with real events that happened during Birkeland's unfortunate, yet successful, life time. Through reading this novel, I was truly inspired and was impressed by his work ethics. I realized that he put lots of effort into his career, and contributed so much to our scientific knowledge of our world. After reading this, I felt like a larger person at heart, because I was able to become aquainted with someone so skilled and intelligent.

I didn't hold out hope for this one - surprise! It was a fascinating blend of biography and the historical events involved in explaining the Northern Lights. Yet more amazing were some of the historical elements that gave background. Jago does a nice job on magnetism as well as on reflecting back on Birkeland's forsightedness in terms of modern physics. This man is truly an unsung hero of physics. If you teach science you will find many exerpts to share with your classes...especially about weather instruments and magnets. As a biography of a scientist/explorer it is equally rich for pulling out portions to share with classes.

Words fail to describe the Aurora. Photographs cannot capture their essence. Science wrestled with an adequate explanation. At the turn of the century, Kristian Birkeland used the latest technology to observe and measure auroral phenomena. His theories so astonished the scientific community that they were rejected outright. Not until fifty years later did satellite data confirm that Birkeland had gotten it mostly right.Kristian Birkeland was a bright and driven man, not afraid to implement his ideas, and persuasive enough to gather backing for them. He developed a number of industrial processes. Members of his team died & became disabled, battling the elements to extract knowledge. Lucy Jago tells his story well. She puts the reader into blizzards and hardship. She amazes us with the bull-headed denial of the British scientists who refused to consider Birkeland's theories, in spite of the evidence he provided. She helps us feel the growing isolation of this driven man.The book is based on primary historical sources, as well as secondary works. Jago opted not to clutter the text with footnotes, but provided a solid bibliography. Jago's book reminds us of an era when science was dangerous and uncertain. Research didn't take place in multi-billion dollar government laboratories. Funding was even more uncertain then than now. Kristian Birkeland had tremendous drive, courage and charisma--and Jago makes this available to us.At a deeper level, Birkeland's story challenges readers to examine their own lives. Birkeland's theory, one paid for in blood, was rejected by scientific peers because they could not open their minds wide enough to accept surprising information. Today we call this denial. We are left to ponder which truths we deny because they would disrupt our comfortable status quo.(If you'd like to discuss this book or review further, please click on the "about me" link above & drop me an email. Thanks!)

It was only in the 1960s that satellites and scientists had given a full scale explanation of why the northern lights occurred. It comes as a surprise to learn, then, that they were essentially confirming the work of a scientist of the early twentieth century, the first to study the aurora and to get the explanation right. It was a stunning scientific achievement, accomplished with the sort of icy adventure one associates with polar explorers, and he accomplished a good deal of other original work, too, but the name of Kristian Birkeland is almost unknown. It is a good thing that we now have _The Northern Lights: The True Story of the Man Who Unlocked the Secrets of the Aurora Borealis_ (Knopf) by Lucy Jago. Jago starts with a harrowing description of Birkeland's expeditions to northern observatories to get data, told with a novelist's skill. He needed the data to confirm his intuitions that the lights were due to the magnetic activity of the sun. If this weren't enough, Birkeland then went to the lab to design a series of vacuum chambers which could reproduce in miniature the solar system and could demonstrate the aurora artificially. His work, however, was barely mentioned in England, and then unfavorably. Birkeland's ideas confounded a unanimous opinion of British scientists, and the Royal Society, that space was a vacuum and nothing more; Lord Kelvin himself had decreed that the sun could have no effect on geomagnetic activity. Jago speculates that the slowness of acceptance of Birkeland's ideas set back auroral and geomagnetic physics by fifty years. Confirming his ideas so that even the British scientific establishment would have to accept them set Birkeland to thinking of a grand plan of several observatories around the Arctic which could do such things as triangulation to get a better picture of where the lights were. Such a plan would take a great deal of money. One of the strengths of Jago's biography is that she has told a good deal about Birkeland's drive for finance. He was granted various patents, including the one for pulling nitrogen out of the air to make fertilizer, the one that made him rich.Birkeland's dedication to his work took its toll on his health and his personal life. A late marriage was short-lived, and he descended into paranoia, probably fueled by overuse of alcohol and barbiturates to calm some sort of mania. He was successful in his financial dealings, but they brought him into conflict with the director of Norsk Hydro, who may have betrayed Birkeland out of a Nobel Prize. However, Birkeland was a likeable absentminded professor, drifting on walks between his tram stop and his office in a preoccupation of technical dreams. He was unable to keep a diary, remember appointments, or attend to accounting principles. He had the admirable trait of knowing how scientific knowledge was gained: "You learn more from your mistakes than your victories," he once said cheerfully, after being thrown through the