Overview

François Arago, the first to show in 1810 that the surface of the Sun and stars is made of incandescent gas and not solid or liquid, was a prominent physicist of the 19th century. He used his considerable influence to help Fresnel, Ampere and others develop their ideas and make themselves known. This book covers his personal contributions to physics, astronomy, geodesy and oceanography, which are far from negligible, but insufficiently known. Arago was also an important and influential political man who, for example, abolished slavery in the French colonies. One of the last humanists, he had a very broad culture and range of interests. In parallel to his biography, this title also covers the spectacular progresses of science at the time of Arago, especially in France: the birth of physical optics, electromagnetism and thermodynamics. Francois Arago’s life is a fascinating epic tale that reads as a novel.

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9783319207223

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Reviews

Francois Arago is a fine, scholarly work, fully footnoted, with a detailed bibliography. The layout and exposition are clear, making it easy to locate specific researches. It is very well written and easy to read. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and learned much from it, and warmly recommend it to everyone interested in early-19th-Century astronomy and physics. (Allan Chapman, The Observatory, Vol. 136 (1252), June, 2016)

“This book has great potential utility for the historian of astronomy and amply succeeds in its effort to reorient Arago’s legacy around his central role as astronomer while showing the breadth that the role could entail. … this book can be thought of as a corrective to a historical memory that has written astronomy out of Arago’s legacy.” (Theresa Levitt, Journal for the History of Astronomy, Vol. 48 (2), 2017) “François Arago is a fine, scholarly work, fully footnoted, with a detailed bibliography. The layout and exposition are clear, making it easy to locate specific researches. It is very well written and easy to read. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and learned much from it, and warmly recommend it to everyone interested in early-19th-Century astronomy and physics.” (Allan Chapman, The Observatory, Vol. 136 (1252), June, 2016)

Author Information

James Lequeux completed his PhD thesis in radioastronomy in 1962 and was an assistant, then associate, professor of physics and astronomy at Paris University until 1966. He was an Astronomer from 1966-1999 and an invited scientist at CalTech from 1968-1969. Dr. Lequeux was also the Director of the Marseilles Observatory from 1983-1988 and was Editor-in-Chief of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics for 15 years. He retired in 1999 and then began work on the history of astronomy, a subject he presently writes about. Dr. Lequeux has published over 403 papers and five books, including The Interstellar Medium (Springer 2005) and Le Verrier: Magnificent and Detestable Astronomer (Springer 2013).

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