Science Feels Sexy in The Age of Wonder

Such fraternization between poets and scientists wasn't uncommon. Poetry and science weren't wholly separate yet: they were seen as complementary ways of piercing the veil of everyday phenomena. William Wordsworth, Lord Byron and the Shelleys (Percy Bysshe and Mary) followed scientific breakthroughs like sports scores. Holmes traces echoes of the astronomical work of William Herschel, who discovered Uranus, through Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner ("the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward") and into Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer": "Then I felt like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken."

Herschel is the most touching figure in Age of Wonder. A refugee from Germany, he began his career as an oboist, but at 27 became consumed with curiosity about the stars and started building his own telescopes. He was discovered by the son of a Royal Society member, who stumbled over him moon-gazing in the streets one night through a home-brewed 7-ft. (2 m) telescope that turned out to be more powerful than that of the astronomer royal. Herschel went on to pioneer the idea of a vast and unimaginably old universe. After looking through Herschel's telescope, Byron wrote, "It was the comparative insignificance of ourselves and our world, when placed in competition with the mighty whole, of which it is an atom, that first led me to imagine that our pretensions to eternity might be ... over-rated."

Holmes doesn't romanticize the Romantics. The first great age of ballooning, which began so amusingly in the skies above Paris, rapidly declined into mere showmanship. (The flamboyant Italian aerialist Vincent Lunardi once proposed the following toast: "I give you me, Lunardi — whom all the ladies love!") From there it descended into tragedy and defeat. At one of Lunardi's public launches, a young man got tangled up in some of the balloon's ropes, was dragged aloft, then fell to his death. Lunardi died in poverty, and the dauntless Pilâtre was killed while attempting to cross the English Channel.

Ballooning wouldn't be revived in earnest for decades. But it had permanently changed the way people thought about the planet. "It had been imagined that it would reveal the secrets of the heavens above," Holmes writes, "but in fact it showed the secrets of the world beneath. The early aeronauts suddenly saw the earth as a giant organism, mysteriously patterned and unfolding, like a living creature." Shelley must surely have been among the first to imagine the earth as it would be seen by astronauts a century and a half later:

Green and azure sphere which shinest
With a light which is divinest
Among all the lamps of Heaven
To whom light and life is given

For the time being, it was left to the poets to go where the earthbound scientists could not.

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