“The findings of Somerville, Mary:
Relating the sciences, varied.
Her knowledge, collecting;
The STEM fields, connecting,
In textbook most extraordinary.”
The 15 April 2021 Twitter biography noted the myriad accomplishments of Mary Somerville, an accomplished researcher who published On the Connection of the Physical Sciences in 1858.
“The findings of Somerville, Mary: /
Relating the sciences, varied.”
Mary Somerville (1780-1872) was a gifted scientist and author; she wrote articles and books related to astronomy, physics, and other varied STEM fields.
“Her knowledge, collecting; /
The STEM fields, connecting, /
In textbook most extraordinary.”
While Somerville wrote many books, her most famous text is likely the one cited in the introduction to this post: On the Connection of the Physical Sciences. It deliberately examines links and connections between scientific topics: defying disciplinary barriers and thus anticipating many of the challenges that still persist in STEM today.
The book discusses such varied and accessible topics as the moon’s orbit, the processes of photography, and the vibrations of strings involved in music, as well as the underlying scientific concepts, processes, and patterns beneath all of these. Somerville writes in the book’s introduction: “Science, regarded as the pursuit of truth, must ever afford occupation of consummate interest, and subject of elevated meditation… Our knowledge of external objects is founded upon experience, which furnishes facts; the comparison of these facts establishes relations, from which the belief that like causes will produce like effects leads to general laws.”
Given the wide range of her academic interests, Somerville was the first person to ever be described via the word “scientist”; this was a term coined by her contemporary William Whewell (1794-1866) in describing Somerville’s varied interests, since job titles such as “astronomer” or “mathematician” alone were disciplinarily insufficient. (Like Somerville, Whewell was a widely interested researcher, and he gave many useful neologisms to both STEM and the humanities.)
Somerville’s “textbook most extraordinary” is available online via Project Gutenberg.
Chemphasis 