In retrospect: The celestial message | Nature

In retrospect: The celestial message | Nature

THE SCIENCE CLASSICS TO CATCH UP ON

If you’ve got time on your hands, why not catch up on some of the science classics you’ve always intended to read (or pretended to have read).

• Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus nuncius (The Celestial Messenger) was the first telescopic survey of the sky, published 400 years ago. Historian John Heilbron reflects on the little book that changed everything. (Nature | 5 min read)
• Self-taught mathematician Mary Fairfax Somerville first achieved an overview of scientific achievement — and arguably launched popular science as a genre. Science writer Richard Holmes enjoys her brilliant and original 1834 book, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. (Nature | 6 min read)
• More than 50 years after it was published, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring lit a beacon of reason that continues to burn, writes evolutionary biologist Rob Dunn. Carson dared to criticize the then-wanton use of pesticides, changed US and international policy and helped to give rise to the environmental movement. (Nature | 5 min read)
• Alfred Russel Wallace's masterpiece of biogeography, The Malay Archipelago, takes readers on a joyride through the vast chain of islands stretching eastward from Sumatra. Science writer David Quammen enjoys “a wondrous book of travel and adventure that wears its deeper significance lightly”. (Nature | 6 min read)
• Science writer Philip Ball reviews the surprising insight and imagination of John Dalton’s New System of Chemical Philosophy: “one of those foundational books that doesn't say what you might think it should”. (Nature | 6 min read)