Galileo's Daughter Analysis

Dava Sobel is a graduate of The Bronx High School of Science and Binghamton University. She holds honorary doctor of letters degrees from the University of Bath and Middlebury College. Many of her works have received recognition, including her text Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love, which was nominated for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. Her works have received quite the publicity, having been dramatised for television and also having an asteroid named after her: asteroid 30935 Davasobel. She has also featured as a judge for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award in 2012.
Within the text there seem to be three main themes or sections. The first of these is Sobel showing
We are also told of the grand prize: a reward that would be worth several million dollars today. It was set out by the Longitude Act, passed by the British Parliament in 1714 – all for a ‘Practicable and Useful’ means of determining longitude. Dava Sobel then shows us many solutions people came up with, and we can see the grand scale of the people trying to solve this challenge and them simply not succeeding. One example, of the many, is when “in 1699, Samuel Fyler, the seventy-year old rector of Stockton in Wiltshire, England, came up with a way to draw longitude meridians on the night sky” (45). However the ideas and solutions presented at the time were impractical or nearly impossible, due to the lack technology available at the time. Solutions proposed by famous and recognised scientists, such as Galileo, could have been done in theory. His idea was to use the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter, which “he claimed occurred one thousand times annually – and so predictably that one could set a watch by them. He used observations to create tables of each satellite’s expected disappearances and reappearances over the course of several months” (25). One of the many reasons that this idea was impractical, as were the many others, was that “nighttime observations could be carried on for only part of the year, and then only when skies were clear” (26).
Dava Sobel is a skilled storyteller, as the awards she has received show, such as her being in the final for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. The text has received many prestigious awards and recognition too, which gives it a lot of credibility and importance. The main one was when it was awarded British Book of the Year, 1997. Dava Sobel also features a very large beginning section, which includes the two first themes I mentioned. This part isn’t about John Harrison himself, but they are the extremely important events that lead up to his life and his purpose. I really enjoyed this view of the story as it provided a lot of background information and context. This then made the latter parts of the biography, about his life’s work, much more understandable and enjoyable. The book features a lot of the scientific aspects of what occurred, which perhaps might have deterred some more casual or less-informed readers, and there is also a lot of explanation in detail about Harrison’s clocks. However, Dava Sobel wrote about this in a very clear way, and made the entire events accessible to more readers through the concise language and writing style that she uses. So I enjoyed the text for the large amount of background information that it provided, as it is very interesting, and for the detailed but accessible explanations that it has – which is why I recommend it.