Celebrating unsung women scientists who furthered knowledge of the cosmos
“What we don’t see, we assume can’t be. What a destructive assumption,” writes Octavia Butler. The quote serves as apt epigraph to Shohini Ghose’s engaging new book, “Her Space, Her Time: How Trailblazing Women Scientists Decoded the Hidden Universe,” out this fall from MIT Press. Ghose, a quantum physicist and professor of physics and computer science at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, looks at a number of women who furthered our knowledge of our Earth, our solar system, our universe, and who were often invisible in doing so, ignored or uncredited for their achievements. The women here are “rule breakers and trend setters,” she writes; “this book is about these unsung explorers of the cosmos, invisible stars here on Earth who made the unseen universe visible,” including Bibha Chowdhuri, who helped discover two fundamental particles in nature; Cecilia Payne, who discovered the chemical composition of the universe; Lise Meitner, who figured out nuclear fission; Henrietta Leavitt and Margaret Burbidge, who helped discover the Big Bang; and some of the women of the Harvard College Observatory, including Annie Jump Cannon. Ghose explains complex concepts with clarity, understandable for the non-scientist, and the book is a passionate look at the women who’ve pushed our understanding forward in space exploration, radioactivity, the splitting of the atom, and subatomic imaging, revealing the crucial role women have played, bringing their achievements to light, and in doing, making a strong case for women’s place in science now.
Harvard psychologist advocates for a mindful body
Watching her mother’s experience with cancer convinced psychologist Ellen J. Langer “that our current approach to health may make us sicker.” In her new book, “The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health” (Ballantine), Langer, the first woman to be tenured in psychology at Harvard, where she’s still a professor, makes a cogent, compelling case for how changing our minds can change our bodies. Langer is known for her contributions to the study of mindfulness, which she describes as the “simple process of actively noticing things,” and the new book details, with warmth, clarity, and grounded, practical wisdom, how to live with a “mindful body.” Our expectations for ourselves and others are “too often woefully low,” she writes. We’re capable of more than we think we are, and Langer demonstrates how to gain access to the full potential of our bodies. Peppered with anecdotes and supported by research, the book offers clear advice and memorable fragments to carry around like smooth stones in the pocket of the mind, to touch with your mental thumb as reminder: “Expecting defeat too often creates defeat”; mistakes are “portals into something new.” Thought-provoking, no-nonsense, convincing, the book shows that a mindset of plenty and possibility changes outcomes, makes life more positive, more satisfying, and healthier.
New poetry collection explores death and its aftermath
In a poem called “Falling Giants,” Brian Turner writes of whale death, of their head-first descent “into the gloom,” carrying “decades of their lives with them” as they drop in the “ocean pounded by thunder, charged by lightning / and the midnight voltage of a storm far out at sea.” They drop with “the sensation of two immense bodies sliding and brushing alongside one another in the deep.” In the final image, we’re brought into a memory of breach, “a kind of announcement to the universe / they they were here, on planet Earth, a presence in this world, alive.” There is death in Turner’s lush and elegiac new collection, “The Goodbye World Poem” (Alice James), the slipping between being and non-being. After goneness, among goneness, in the forever aftermath of absence, his lines assert a definitive, probing presence, an earthly hereness, where “here we are just standing out in the yard, / the living among the dead,” and where coconut oil as lubricant “sugared the room with its fragrance.”
Coming out
“Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto” by Kohei Saito, translated from the Japanese by Brian Bergstrom (Astra)
“You Dreamed of Empires” by Álvaro Enrigue, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Riverhead)
“Relic” by Ed Simon (Bloomsbury)
Pick of the week
Lisa Valentino of Ink Fish Books in Warren, R.I., recommends “Reef Road” by Deborah Goodrich Royce (Post Hill): “A brilliant thriller that taps into an unsolved true crime story. It is masterfully written through two points of view, which expose the impact of violence and family trauma.”