The Northern Lights » (Reprint)

Lucy Jago is a former documentary producer for Channel 4 and the BBC. She has been awarded two academic scholarships and a Double First Class Honours Degree from King's College, University of Cambridge, and a master's degree from the Courtauld Institute, London. She lives in Dorset, England.

  Science, biography, and arctic exploration coverage in this extraordinary true story of the life and work of Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland, the troubled genius who solved the mysteries of one of nature’s most spectacular displays.  
   Captivated by the otherworldly lights of the aurora borealis, Birkeland embarked on a lifelong quest to discover their cause.  His pursuit took him to some of the most forbidding landscapes on earth, from the remote snowcapped mountains of Norway to the war-torn deserts of Africa.  In the face of rebuke by the scientific establishment, sabotage by a jealous rival, and his own battles with depression and paranoia, Birkeland remained steadfast.  Although ultimately vindicated, his theories were unheralded—and his hopes for the Nobel Prize scuttled—at the time of his suspicious death in 1917.
   The Northern Lights offers a brilliant account of the physics behind the aurora borealis and a rare look inside the mind of one of history's most visionary scientists.

Publishers Weekly

Crackling with Arctic adventure, this biography of the brilliant Norwegian physicist Kristian Birkeland (1873-1917) is set in the early 20th century and cast against the driving spirits of the Edwardian Age. Freewheeling capitalism, imperialism, industrialization and a near reverence for the growing myth of science informed Birkeland's cerebral and adventurous life. A stolid Scandinavian with a wide-ranging imagination, he undertook the first scientific studies of the aurora borealis, which had previously been explained by a range of theories that included the supernatural. Detailed descriptions of his expeditions to the far polar reaches of the earth are filled with scientific wonder and life-threatening hazards. Through his short life, Birkeland continued his studies of the northern lights. He evolved a theory, proven after his death, that the origin of this natural phenomenon is in the electromagnetic energy of the sun and its profound influence on the earth. At the same time, he also developed a financially successful method of extracting nitrogen, for fertilizer, from the air and performed seminal work on the military applications of electricity. Birkeland also traveled to romantic places for research: Russia, Egypt, Sudan and Japan. Yet beneath the apparently successful surface of Birkeland's life were deep strains. He abused alcohol and barbiturates, lost friends and colleagues, destroyed his marriage and died alone and paranoid in a foreign country, yielding a bittersweet story capably told by British TV journalist and BBC producer Jago. Illus. (Oct. 1) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.