London-based writer Andrew Robinson has reviewed a selection of prominent new science publications, highlighting works that span historical astronomy, medical breakthroughs, and economic theory.
In What Science Says About Astrology, published by Columbia University Press, science writer Carlos Orsi examines the complex relationship between astrology and scientific inquiry. Orsi notes that while seventeenth-century astronomers such as Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler practiced astrology, the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century reclassified it as a pseudoscience. Despite this shift, the practice remains commercially viable, with the global market valued at an estimated $12.8 billion in 2020. Orsi observes that contemporary astrologers are more proficient at retroactively explaining past events through planetary positions than they are at predicting the future.
Shifting focus to medicine, epidemiologist Karen Torghele’s biography Albert Sabin, released by Yale University Press, chronicles the life of the physician-researcher behind the oral polio vaccine. While Jonas Salk’s injectable vaccine debuted in 1955, it was Sabin’s oral variant, distributed beginning in 1961, that enabled widespread mass immunization. Torghele details Sabin’s efficient yet abrasive personality and emphasizes that he never sought financial profit from his invention.
In the realm of aerospace, former physics teacher and science writer Trisha Muro addresses the principles of space travel in It’s (Just) Rocket Science, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Inspired by the 1986 Challenger disaster as a 12-year-old, Muro now writes for untrained enthusiasts, explaining fundamental physics alongside the challenges encountered by missions such as the Voyager probes. She suggests that humanity continues to grapple with the same fundamental questions posed by early astronomers like Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo.
Finally, J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev offer Against Money, published by the University of Chicago Press, which provides a critical examination of monetary systems. These reviews collectively showcase the breadth of current scientific literature, from historical analysis to contemporary economic critique.
Is the economic critique in ‘Against Money’ actually rigorous, or is it just another ideology piece dressed up as science?
Sabin’s refusal to profit from his vaccine stands in stark contrast to modern pharmaceutical practices. A worthy role model.
I’m surprised the global astrology market is valued at $12.8 billion. People really are willing to pay for vague predictions.
Did you know Galileo practiced astrology? That historical overlap is fascinating and often overlooked in modern debates.