Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Crystallography, Patterns, Art and Archeology

 

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, linocut print, 11" x 14", by Ele Willoughby, 2025

Before Nobel laureate English chemist and x-ray crystallographer Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin (née Crowfoot, 1910-1994) won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for her models of biomolecules like penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin, which were essential to structural biology, or even studied chemistry, she considered becoming an archeologist. Archeology was, in a sense, the family business. The eldest of four daughters of English parents who were in the colonial administration of North Africa and the Middle East, and later, archeologists, Dorothy was born in Cairo, Egypt. Her father, mother, maternal aunts, and later, sister and niece all worked as archeologists and she herself contributed to her parents archeological work. The family escaped the heat of the Egyptian summers by returning to England. When Dorothy was 4, her mother left her and her sisters Joan (2) and Elizabeth (7 months) with her Crowfoot grandparents near Worthing and returned to her husband and life in Egypt. The girls grew up with grandparents in England with parental support from afar. Dorothy became interested in chemistry as early as 4 and interested in crystals by age 10; "captured for life by chemistry and crystals," she later wrote. Her parents supported her interest, and she was even able to set up a lab in the attic in her grandparents' home. Her parents moved to Sudan where her father was in charge of eduction and archeology until 1926. She had one extended trip to spend time with her parents in Khartoum when she was 13. On her 16th birthday her mother gave her W.H. Bragg's 'Concerning the Nature of Things' about x-ray crystallography, which used the scatter pattern of x-rays through crystals at different angles, recorded on photographic plates to image crystals and use mathematics to then deduce their structure from these patterns.  Post-WWI her parents eventually returned to their habit of summering in England to spend time with their children and escape the heat while working abroad. After retiring from the Sudan Civil Service in 1926, her father took job as Director of the British School of Archeology in Jerusalem and her parents lived there until 1935.

Dorothy joined her parents at the archeological site Jerash (present day Jordan) and documented patterns of mosaics of several 5th to 6th century Byzantine era churches. The Byzantine floor mosaics of coloured glass tessarae were remarkably well preserved and she put her illustration talents to work. "I drew in outline the patterns, reduced to 1/10th which made each tessera 1 mm square, and coloured small parts of each drawing for the record," she wrote. She loved the beautiful decoration and the challenges of the geometry intrigued her. She wrote to her grandmother July 1, 1928,  how "They are nearly all geometrical interlacing patterns. This one covers the norther apse of Bishop Paul's church and has a big key pattern of repeating octagons." When she thought back on this work in later years, she wrote, "I began to think of the restraints imposed by two-dimensional order in a plane." She met distinguished Dominican archeologist Père Vincent in Jerusalem and he encouraged her to create fully illustrated exact copies of the mosaics, rather than simply placing coloured dots on each tile drawn to record the colour. She did not want to be thought lazy, and took his advice. She took two years to finish her drawing just as she entered Oxford to study chemistry. Her sister Betty wrote, "I wonder she didn't go blind doing all the tiny squares." She sent her paintings to Yale, co-sponsor of the expedition, as part of the official record of the excavation. Her meticulousness, determination, persistence, patience, focus and delight in patterns, which would prove vital in her career as a chemist, were seen already in this archeological work. She would always sketch patterns she observed at historical sites while on vacation for the rest of her life. At Oxford she also performed chemical analyses of glass tesserae from these sites, though silicate analysis would not normally be part of her degree. She so enjoyed field archeology she considered switching her field of study. While doing her degree she participated in digs organized by the Ashmolean Museum. She even persuaded a junior researcher to lend her lab equipment and even make gas connections on the roof so she analyze glass tesserae from Jerash over the vacation break. She graduated Oxford with a first class degree in chemistry in 1932.

Painting of the floor mosaic from Jerash completed over the period of a year by Dorothy Crowfoot, while a chemistry undergraduate at Oxford, now at the Yale University Art Gallery. Copyright Yale University.

Detail of painting of the floor mosaic from Jerash completed over the period of a year by Dorothy Crowfoot, while a chemistry undergraduate at Oxford, now at the Yale University Art Gallery. Copyright Yale University.

She entered the PhD programme at Cambridge later that year studying with John Desmond Bernal and became interested in the use of x-ray crystallography to study the structure of proteins. She worked with Bernal on the first application of the method to image a biomolecule, pepsin. Previously, the method had only been used for inorganic crystals. Bernal believed in equal opportunities for women in chemistry and helped make x-ray crystallography one of the few fields with significant representation from women scientists. He followed in the example of William H. Bragg himself, who had 11 women amongst his 18 students. In 1933 she was awarded a research fellowship at Somerville College and returned to Oxford in 1934  to teach with her own lab equipment. She missed the day Bernal made the first photo of an x-ray of a protein crystal for health reasons. She was only 24 when she began experiencing pain in her hand which was diagnosed as chronic rheumatoid arthritis. She went to a clinic in Bruton for thermal baths and gold treatments before returning to work. The disease caused her hands to swell and become distorted; she had to add a special lever to the allow her to continue to use the main switch on the x-ray equipment. The disease is progressive and caused increasingly debilitating pain, problems and deformities in her hands and feet. 

Hands of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin II, 1978, one of a series of lithographs by Henry Moore
of Dorothy's hands. He was inspired by the extraordinary and precise work she was able to do though she had acute arthritis in her hands since a young age. 
 (c) The Henry Moore Foundation 

She was appointed the college's first fellow and tutor in chemistry in 1936, a roll she held until 1977. She earned her PhD in 1937 on the x-ray crystallography and chemistry of sterols. In 1945 with C.H. Carlisle, she published the first structure of a steroid, chloresterol iodide. From 1941 through 45, she worked with colleagues including Barbara Low, on solving the structure of penicillin. She made her calculations manually with a set of specially printed paper strips and with her team plotted 108,00 points in the molecule to make two-dimensional contours of electron densities. With help from her sister, she drew the contour sheets on perspex so these 2D slices could be stacked to visualize the molecule in three dimensions. When I see this unique, innovative and artistic scientific visualization, I cannot help but think how her first job making precise archeological illustrations, and making close observations of patterns in tiles, helped prime her mind for this task. Only then could she make the traditional ball and stick model (like I have shown in my portrait); she surrounded hers with 2D contour plots of electron density. Country to scientific opinion, they found that penicillin contained a β-lactam ring. She was doing all this intense work while Thomas was teaching in Newcastle; she had to send him a telegram to alert him the arrival of their second child was imminent. The research was characterized as a wartime secret. She sent Thomas a postcard, 'Think we really have found out something for certain about P. Am extremely cheerful.' They completed the work on VE day in 1945. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1947. They published their penicillin results in 1949; she bowed to social pressure at this point and added Hodgkin to her name, though she had up to this point published as Dorothy Crowfoot.

Perspex model constructed with her sister Betty Crowfoot with electron densities. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, MUSEUM OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

In 1948, Merck discovered vitamin B12, one of the most complex vitamins then known, and Hodgkin created some new crystals. Merck only published its refractive indices. When she realized it contained cobalt, she knew the almost completely unknown structure could be established with x-ray crystallography, but its size and largely unidentified atomic components would make it a challenge. Since the crystals were pleochroic (they displayed different colours at different angles), she deduced the presence of a ring structure, confirmed by x-ray crystallography. Her 1954 published study was described by Nobel Laureate Lawrence Bragg as being as significant as "breaking the sound barrier." She published the final structure in 1955 and 56. 

Large hand screen-printed wallpaper sample in grey, lilac and black with Insulin 8.27 pattern, crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin, designer William J. Odell, made by John Line and Sons Ltd. Design was in production in 1951 and was used in the Regatta Restaurant. From a collection of 83 samples designed for the 1951 Festival of Britain. 
© V&A

Her old grad school friend, Cambridge crystallographer Dr Helen Megaw, had long noted the beauty of crystal structures. "I am constantly being impressed by the beauty that crops up," she wrote in 1946, "I would like to suggest not merely that designers should look through it for new ideas, but that they should select a few of the best which would be utilisable without substantial alteration, apply them to appropriate fabrics, and give such pattern its correct name." Following a discussion with chief industrial designer Mark Hartland Thomas of the Council of Industrial Design, in 1949, she was appointed scientific consultant of the Festival Pattern Group of the Festival of Britain, a national exhibit and fair which reached millions of visitors in 1951. Helen put scientific crystallographic images into the hands of designers for use at the Festival and beyond. Such imagery made it onto 80 designs for everything from curtains, wallpapers, carpets, lace, dresses, fabrics, ties, plates to ashtrays. She personally embroidered a crystallographic image on a cushion as a wedding gift for Dorothy and Thomas. Megaw recruit drawings from leaders in the field including Dorothy, Lawrence Bragg, Max Perutz, and John Kendew, all eventual Nobel laureates. Amongst the designs are imagery based on Dorothy's expert illustration of insulin 8.27 turned into wallpaper for the Regatta restaurant. The same molecule also made it onto plastic laminate in blue and gold. Insulin designs appeared on wallpaper, carpet, lace, and leather craft designs. The scientists names were kept secret at the time, but they were paid for £5 for their work, though Dorothy declined payment. "I feel rather doubtful whether I own any copyright of a pattern perpetrated by nature," she said. Dorothy's immense skill as a draughtsman can be seen in her gorgeous and intricate insulin illustration. Helen supervised production and could veto scientifically meaningless designs. The stylized insulin design based on Dorothy's painting retains the fundamental structure of the molecule as a series of hexagonal rosettes with internal structures and in a second more abstracted design.

Festival Pattern Group design process for textiles including insulin based on Dorothy's diagrams and Pentaerythritol 
 

In 1953, she, Sydney Brenner, Jack Dunitz, Leslie Orgel, and Beryl Oughton (later Rimmer), were the first people to drive from Oxford to Cambridge in two cars to see the model of the double helix of DNA built by James Watson and Francis Crick, informed by x-ray crystallography by Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin and their student Gosling. 

In 1957 the Royal Society awarded her the Royal Medal and she became a reader at Oxford, gaining a full, modern laboratory in 1958. She was appointed the Royal Society's Wolfs Research Professor in 1960 through 1970 which provided salary, research expenses and assistance and she was a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford from 1977 to 1983. 

Insulin, illustrated by Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. This drawing was presented to crystallographer Dr. Helen Megan who was organizing the Festival Pattern Group in Britain in 1951. Hodgkin refused a fee or to copyright an image found in nature. Megaw organized an exhibit of the wonders of scientific patterns applied in design as part of the Festival of Britain. I decided life is too short to try and make a relief print of a molecule this complex! So in my portrait, Dorothy's shirt is based on the stylized Festival of Britain wallpaper instead.

One of her most important and celebrated studies was the longest lasting. She first received a sample of insulin in 1934. The size and complexity of the molecule was too great to explore with x-ray crystallography at that time, but the importance of the hormone captured her imagination. She had paused this research to work on the structure of penicillin, which contains 17 atoms, and vitamin B12, which contains 181 atoms, but returned to it later. By 1969, 35 years later, she was finally able to work with an international team of young scientists to reveal the structure of insulin. Insulin contains 788 atoms! It's hard to overstate the size of the task and the sheer number of calculations involved. This work was instrumental in our ability to mass-produce insulin and treat diabetes and also to allow scientists to alter the structure of the molecule to create even better drug options. She remained active in collaborating on insulin production and drug development to better treat diabetes. 

Sample of Insulin 8.25 wallpaper design made for the Festival of Britain. This simplified and stylized insulin design inspired the blouse she's wearing in my portrait. 
Crystallographer: Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin; designed by Robert Sevant forJohn Line and Sons. Dorothy Hodgkin's diagram, on which this screen-printed wallpaper is based, was originally published in an article in 'Proceedings of the Royal Society' in 1938. The designer used the rounded hexagonal forms and omitted the triangular ones. This wallpaper was used in the Cinema Foyer at the Exhibition of Science in 1951.

Soft-spoken and gentle but determined and hardworking, Hodgkin inspired her students, whom she encouraged to address her simply as Dorothy. Her most famous student moved on from chemistry to politics; conservative UK PM Margaret Thatcher (née Roberts), hung Hodgkin's portrait in her office, out of respect for her former tutor, the lifelong Labour supporter, sometime Communist Party of Britain member and pacifist Hodgkin. Hodgkin's politics were greatly influenced by her mentor Bernal, an open and vocal communist and supporter of the Soviet regime until it invaded Hungary in 1956. She always called him "Sage" and they briefly had a relationship (unconventionally, Bernal had an open marriage) before she met Thomas Hodgkin. Thomas was teaching adult education classes in northern English mining and industrial communities, after resigning from the Colonial Office. Intermittently a member of the Communist Party, he later wrote several works on African politics and history and lectured at Balliol College, Oxford. The two married in 1937 and had three children, Luke (1938-2020), Elizabeth (1941), and Toby (1946). Thomas spent a much time in west Africa, supporting and chronicling emerging postcolonial states. A lifelong advocate for peace, Dorothy campaigned against nuclear arms and the Vietnam war. Because of Dorothy's political activities and her husband's communist party membership she was banned from entering the US in 1953, and subsequently not allowed in without CIA waiver. 

She was in Ghana, where her husband was an advisor to president in 1964 when she learned she had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry her work on the structure of biomolecules. She served as President of the International Union of Crystallography, an organization she helped found, from 1972 to 1975 and worked to foster international collaboration. She worked to include Chinese and Soviet scientists through the Cold War. In 1976 she won the prestigious Copley Medal, the first woman to do so (the second wasn't until Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 2021). Concerned about social inequities and preventing war and in 1976 she became the longest-serving president of the international Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, which brings scientists and public figures to work together to reduce the risk of armed conflict and seek solutions to global security threats. She stepped down in 1988 after the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty ban on short and long-range nuclear weapons. She accepted the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet government in 1987 for her peace and disarmament work. Fellow chemist, peace activist and Nobel laureate Linus Pauling had recommended her for the award.

In later years she spent a great deal of time in a wheelchair because of the progress of the rheumatoid arthritis, but she was able to remain an active scientist. She skipped the 1987 Congress of the International Union of Crystallography in Australia, but attended the 1993 Congress in Beijing. She died by stroke in 1994 in her husband's village of Ilmington. 

The Royal Society now awards the Dorothy Hodgkin Award in her honour to outstanding early career scientists requiring flexible work due to caring or health reasons. The Council offices in Hackney, university buildings at the universities of York, Bristol and Keele and the science block at her old school Sir John Leman High School are named in her honour. Oxford International Women's Festival presents the annual Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture in her honour.

Her work helped in the rapid production of penicillin, considered a miracle drug at the time, mapping vitamin B12 helped the fight against pernicious anemia and her structure of insulin greatly improved our ability to treat diabetes. She left her mark on science and society both.

References,

All or Nothing,  Back From the Dead exhibit website from The Museum of the History of Science, 2021

Alman, Margaret. Art in the Atoms: Chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, blog post, February 3, 2010.

Cole, Rupert. Happy Birthday Dorothy Hodgkin. Science Museum blog. May 11, 2018

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Nobel Prize website, accessed January, 2025

Dorothy Hodgkin, Wikipedia, accessed January, 2024

Ferry, Georgina. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. Trowelblazers. September 11, 2014.

Ferry, Georgina. Hodgkin: on proteins and patterns. The Lancet, 384, 1496-1496. 2014.

Forgan, Sophie. Festivals of science and the two cultures: science, design and display in the Festival of Britain, 1951. BJHS, 31, 217-240, 1998.

From Atoms to Patterns. 24 April 2008 - 11 August 2008. Wellcome Collection. 

Helen Megaw. Wikipedia. Accessed May, 2026.

Hodgkin, Dorothy Mary Crowfoot, Jennifer Kamper, June Lindsey, Maureen F. Mackay, Jenny Pickworth, John H. Robertson, Clara Brink Shoemaker, J. G. White, R. J. Prosen and Kenneth N. Trueblood. “The structure of vitamin B12. I. An outline of the crystallographic investigation of vitamin B12.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A. Mathematical and Physical Sciences 242 (1957): 228 - 263.

Smyth, Chris. Science inspired fashion. The Times. May 5, 2008. 

Webb, Poul. Festival of Britain, Part II. Art & Artists. May 3, 2013.

InverteFest Anthology

Cover art by Aspenhearted for the InverteFEST Anthology

I gave a talk this week about Data in Art, featuring how I depict scientific data in my art, and contrasting that with some of my favourites - artists working at the intersection of data and art and scientists who have produced data visualizations influenced by art. I found myself reviewing this blog and some of the posts I have made over the years. I found that I have neglected Magpie and Whiskeyjack! Hence, this is my cue to resume. So, let me draw your attention to the InverteFest Anthology! InverteFest is a thrice-yearly week-long celebration of all things invertebrate. Participants are encouraged to observe and share images of their local invertebrates. Science artists share invertebrate art. Science artist Franz Anthony has been publishing art books of shared invertebrate art. This year, author and artist Saimi Hanma organized an anthology, pairing up writers and artists who all produced collaborative works. It's a weird and wonderful, varied collection (layout by Franz Anthony). There's everything from poetry, to short stories, sci-fi to children's lit, satire, historical fiction and fantasy. You can download it for free from Saimi's website.

My cover art for 'Meet The Pollinators,' written by Lisa Jaffe and illustrated by me, Ele Willoughby

In it you'll find my contribution. I was paired up with Seattle-based writer Lisa Jaffe and together we decided to produce a board book, with some of our favourite pollinators from our respective homes in Ontario and the Pacific Northwest, respectively. She wrote the sweetest text introducing the little ones to our insect neighbours and I illustrated the book with my linocuts of insects and plants. Check it out! Be sure to also check Franz Anthony's gorgeous collections of submitted invertebrate art from artists of all ages, and from all over the world,

Kepler's Dream: Speculative Fiction in Early Science

The idea of the Music of the Spheres, like a symphony made by the motions of the cosmos is ancient. Sometimes Kepler is presented as a modern thinker who took the heliocentric Copernican model and placed it on a mathematical footing, correcting the circular orbits with ellipses (with our Sun at one focus). The truth is messier. Kepler started with music! Influenced by these mystical ideas, Kepler published Harmonices Mundi making his case that musical intervals and harmonies described the known planets and moon. He thought they made an inaudible harmony which could be heard by the soul. He also proposed that the planetary orbits were in the same proportions as a nested series of the five regular Platonic solids. His famous 3 laws of orbital motion were more of an afterthought and even then, he related angular speeds to musical intervals. The image is my Copernicus linocut with Kepler’s scales for planets and moon. 

In retelling the history of science it can often be presented as a series of facts or discoveries, sanitized of wrong turns, misleading presentations and striped of the story of how it was communicated to contemporaries. (I should point out that I'm not talking about how historians of science retell the history of science, but more everyone else). We rarely learn that the giants upon whose shoulders we stand were often also just lucky or got to the right answer for the wrong reasons or simultaneously believed some very strange, unsubstantiated things. There's a story to be told by the way thinkers and early scientists communicated their ideas to their contemporaries, and it's not a story which is well-known.

“Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.”

-Alexander Pope, 1688

It's occurred to me that basically, I'm railing against Pope, cause that's nonsense. Don't get me wrong. I'm a physicist by training. Newton's impact on physics and science broadly was tremendous. Newton's laws of motion, Newton's law of universal gravitation, and optics were genuinely revolutionary. But they didn't occur in a vacuum (no pun intended). Our knowledge of Newton's science is not due to his existence and the sudden consequential enlightenment for us all. Newton was a piece of work. We owe the publication of his grand book the Principia (1687) largely to the patience, diplomacy and determined persuasion of Edmond Halley (of comet fame) because otherwise, Newton might have taken much of his knowledge to the grave in a paranoid and antisocial fashion. Newton also had some very odd, arguably heretical religious and occultist beliefs and practised alchemy, which while it was a precursor of chemistry, was definitely filled with ideas that were not scientific and based on ideas about magic. Further, other scientists were working toward similar scientific ideas as Newton, which belies the lone genius myth. Robert Hooke (another real character) had deduced that gravitation was an inverse square law; the two argued over who had first made this discovery and I suspect Newton added Hooke to his long list of enemies. But even Newton acknowledged that Hooke and others knew the form of the law of gravitation by the 1660s.  Halley himself had a weird and incorrect hollow Earth theory. We learn about Johannes Kepler's brilliant laws of planetary motion, building on Copernicus's heliocentric model, but it's rarely stressed that he came to his ideas not just through mathematics. It's not often that teachers point out that Kepler's model was based first on music and what frequencies of revolution would make nice harmonies if they were interpreted as notes and later on the proportions of regular Platonic solids, rather than simply trying to model Tycho Brahe's observations (though in his defence, it would decades before the long-awaited publication of the Principia, which would have provided him the tools needed). But my point being, this is not a story of confusion punctuated by insights which suddenly clear everything up. This is a much messier story.

Kepler's Platonic solid model of the Solar System, from Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596)

I think we also often forget that a standard protocol of professional peer review scientific journals is quite recent. Scientific societies go back centuries, and did publish and otherwise disseminate scientific results but quality was mixed, and certainly influenced by biases like the sex, nationality, race, class and rank of the author. There was not a standard method for presenting results. Some discoveries were announced in letters to say, the Royal Society, which can be seen as an early precursor to scientific papers as we know them. Many early discoveries were presented in books. Something I find interesting is how they were combined with literature, in several instances, though not always without danger and risking accusations of heresy. Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake after including some imaginative speculation with his science, arguing the universe is infinite and filled with innumerable potentially inhabitable worlds in 1600. Galileo presented his evidence supporting the Copernican model in 1632 in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo) which is quite literally written as a dialogue between two philosophers and a layman. The staunch anti-Copernican follower of Ptolemy and Aristotle is name Simplicio as a broad hint to the reader! Galileo, like others including Hooke and Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens*, sometimes announced new results in an anagram, to establish priority without actually revealing what they discovered!  English clergyman and natural philosopher John Wilkins wrote The Discovery of a World in the Moone in 1638, inferring from the recent discovery of lunar mountains that it might also have inhabitants. Jesuit scholar and polymath Athanasius Kirchner (who disagreed with Kepler and Galileo) wrote only two pieces of imaginative fiction, but one was a mystical dialogue about space travel between an angel and a narrator called Itinerarium exstaticum in 1656. Huygens also wrote a book length speculation about extraterrestrial life, Cosmotheoros, in Latin, which he had published posthumously in 1698 for fear of censure (written partially as an annoyed response to Kirchner). It was translated in English as The Celestial Worlds Discover'd. When Margaret Cavendish, the first and one of the only women who was able to attend a Royal Society meeting for centuries (as her wealth, rank and connections helped supersede the bias against her sex) and one of the first women to publish in her own name wrote Observations upon Experimental Philosophy in 1666, she appended one of the earliest science fiction novels, a sort of imaginative complement to the science: The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World, better known as The Blazing World, a fantasy, utopian satire. So with this sort of context, perhaps it makes sense that Kepler thought to try and write persuasively about his knowledge of lunar astronomy in the form of fiction, and in fact, an even earlier** example of science fiction. 

Margaret Cavendish and the Blazing World linocut 11" x 14", 2018, by Ele Willoughby

Kepler wrote his Somnium (or The Dream) in 1608 and it was published posthumously in 1634 by his son. Its origin is even earlier. It harkens back to his frustrations with his dissertation of 1593 where he argued that an observer on the moon would see the Earth move just as we see the moon move from our frame of reference. But the Tübingen faculty, who disallowed new Copernican astronomy (and forced Kepler's mentor Maestlin to keep his thoughts to himself) vetoed debate on this idea. Kepler was able to graduate and continue with his career, but never forgot how this irked him. He eventually publishing a mystical combination of Aristotelian and Copernican astronomy called Mysterium Cosmographicum, which landed him a job with Danish astronomer and Imperial Mathematician to the Holy Roman Emperor, Tycho Brahe. Kepler inherited both Brahe's position but more importantly his unparalleled decades of observational data, which ultimately allowed him to deduce his law of ellipses published in his Astronomia Nova in 1609. Then his friend and ecclesiastical advisor to Emperor Rudolph, Wackher von Wackenfels asked him what he thought caused shadows on the moon. Unlike the Aristotelian Emperor who thought they were shadows of Earth's land masses, Kepler knew they were mountains and other geological features. Wackenfels encouraged Kepler to publish his own thoughts on this. So Kepler reimagined his thesis as Somnium, an imaginative story to get around the objections of the Aristotelians and to allow him to introduce a supernatural means of travelling to the moon to give him a reason to speculate about the lunar surface. 

Like Cavendish, he inserts himself into the story, but only as a framing device. Also like Cavendish, his prose is pretty clunky. The plot of the story is that Kepler himself falls asleep, reading a book of legends, and has a dream. He dreams he's reading a book! The book tells of a young 14 year old Icelandic boy named Duracotus, being raised by his widowed mother Fiolxhilde, a wise woman who earns her living selling pouches of herbs to the sailors at port, as lucky charms with healing powers. The boy curiously cuts open a pouch and looses its contents. His mother sells him to the sailor in a fit of pique. Luckily for the boy, the sailor sails promptly to Denmark to deliver a letter to Tycho Brahe, who questions the boy, deems him clever, and decides to train him in astronomy, much to his delight. After five years, he takes his leave and returns home to find his mother had suffered after her rash decision and was overjoyed to see him. He tells her of his experience and training and she is thrilled. She reveals she has her own source of astronomical knowledge, the Daemon of Lavania, or spirit of the moon. Even more astonishingly, it is possible to travel to Lavania (the moon) with the Daemon's help and she proposes they both make the voyage. After sunset, she summons the Daemon and they make the voyage of "fifty thousand German miles" to the moon. This is about a factor of 5 too small, but it's the right order of magnitude and a decent estimate for the day.

Kepler's Somnium, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2022

The voyage is four hours and very difficult, and travellers are "hurled just as though he had been shot aloft by gunpowder to sail over mountains and seas," (to overcome what we now know is gravity) and thus are drugged with opiates to avoid shock. Damp sponges are used to allow them to breathe. The speed is so great the body instinctively rolls up and continues (due to what we now know as inertia) to move forward. They can only travel at the eclipse (notably a maximum of 4.5 hours, long enough for their 4 hour trip) to avoid the solar radiation in transit. The exhausted travellers are immediately brought to a cave, to shelter from the sun, and meet other daemons to learn about the moon's geography. This is an excuse for our author to basically dump all of his lunar astronomy knowledge so there's a long section of facts which don't advance the story as Kepler retells his thesis research. Then he describes a  moon divided into Subvolva (which is below Volva, aka the Earth) and Privolva which never sees Volva (our far-side of the moon). Our moon is tidally-locked to the Earth so we only ever see one side. Kepler explains that the lunar day is a month of two weeks of scorching heat and two weeks of cold. He imagines the Earth, Volva, has a moderating effect on climate. He describes geography like our own but exaggerated with soaring mountains and plunging valleys. Likewise his imagined lifeforms are monstrous in size. He imagines nomadic Privolvans, some with legs larger than camels, or wings, following receding water in boats or diving under water (to survive the extremes of climate). Thus he's imagined intelligent extraterrestrials, which was a radical (and arguably heretical) idea in his time. He imagines Subvolvan like giant serpents wit spongy skin and animals shaped like pinecones. The story ends abruptly. 

Kepler did not get the opportunity to publish this manuscript during his lifetime, but he did circulate it amongst friends. He lost control of the manuscript in 1611 and strangers, not up on the latest debates in science got access to it. Though he literally put himself into the story as the dreamer, readers saw the boy Duracotus trained by Tycho Brahe as a self-insert for Kepler. So they deduced that the fictional mother Fiolxhilde, wise woman and herb seller who communes with a demon, was a stand-in for Kepler's mother Katherine Kepler, an herbalist who was known to her neighbours for her vile temper, raised by an aunt, who had been burned as a witch. Ironically, it is really the Daemon of Lavania who is the voice of Kepler, revealing his lunar knowledge. By 1615, Katherine was arrested on suspicion of being a witch. Kepler's scheme to express his ideas and knowledge in fiction, to avoid the ire of the Aristotelians, had backfired badly, contributing to his mother getting caught up in the witch-craze. Kepler appreciated the danger and dropped all work to fight to exonerate his mother. The fight took 5 years, some of which she spent in prison, and the ordeal hastened her death two years later. Kepler felt culpable and her loss weighed on him. All of his work was set aside during this fight and publishing the Somnium in particular was out of the question. Over the last decade of his life he added 223 footnotes to the text, to insert most of the hard science. Having already faced such extreme consequences he no longer feared reprisals from Aristotelians. But, he died in 1630 with only 6 pages typeset. His son-in-law Jacob Bartsch took over, but he too died suddenly before it was published. Finally, his son Lucas published the book in an effort to help with his mother's financial distress. While not widely known today, the strange text casts has influenced science fiction and a marks one of the earliest scientific studies of an extraterrestrial planetary body.

*Huygens had his own dispute with Hooke over who invented the balance spring to regulate portable watches. 

**But in my book, by no means the earliest. See for instance A True Story by Lucian of Samosata (2nd century CE) which includes space exploration, aliens and interplanetary warfare - and which Kepler owned. There is also a near contemporary Copernican lunar science fiction story written by English historian Francis Godwin (1562-1634), The Man in the Moone, written in the 1620s and published 1638. Of course, clearly defining what counts as science fiction isn't entirely straightforward either.

References

The Somnium Project, accessed March, 2022

Somnium (novel), Wikipedia, accessed March, 2022

Gale E. Christianson, Kepler's Somnium: Science Fiction and the Renaissance Scientist, Science Fiction Studies, #8, vol. 3, part 1, March 1976

Greg Gbur, Somnium, by Johannes Kepler, Skull in the Stars blog, February 23, 2018

Emily Lord Fransee, Mistress of a New World Early Science Fiction in Europe’s “Age of Discovery” , The Public Domain Review, October 11, 2018

Hugh Aldersey-Williams, The Uncertain Heavens, Christiaan Huygens’ Ideas of Extraterrestrial Life, The Public Domain Review, October 21, 2020

Lichen Love

Lichen is a strange and beautiful life form, or rather a mutualistic relationship between algae or Cyanobacteria and fungi to make a composite organism. They have different shapes, sizes, parts, colours and somehow have properties which differ from those of their component parts. Like plants they photosynthesize, but they have no roots. I recall learning as a child how they were the trailblazers, making their home on the rocks of the Canadian Shield, and allowing a succession of other organisms to grow on top, till we have large trees which appear to grow straight out of the rock, but without lichen it could not be there. When lichen grows on trees it is not a parasite, it just uses plants as a surface on which to grow. They grow in a huge range of environments, even tundra, deserts, mountains and rainforests on virtually any convenient surface. Scientists estimate 6 to 8% of the Earth's land surface is covered by lichen, and yet we can walk right by without giving it a second thought.

Some though, have long admired lichen, especially its extraordinary colour palette and variety of textures and forms. This is a selection of the colour charts based on lichen from the Svensk Lafvarnas Farghistoria by Johan Peter Westring. Printed in 1805-09. Via the Biodiversity Heritage Library archive. 

One of my favourite lichen artists is Dr. Immy Smith (website, Etsy, Patreon). They make a wide variety of artwork, much of it about natural history, or drawing on their background in neuroscience, but clearly they love lichen and have observed it very closely.

'Lichen makes the landscape' - Immy Smith with Herbarium RNG curators

They collaborated on the 'Symbiosis' project as part of the part of the Imagining Science Polymathic Art & Science Collaborative, with fellow member Scott Mantooth and other artists, scientists and the University of Reading Herbarium and EM Lab (Centre for Advanced Microscopy). Other drawings illustrate scanning electron microscope images of lichen. You can read more here.

'Reading campus twig' - Immy Smith with Herbarium RNG curators

UK textile artist Amanda Cobett makes papier maché and machine embroidered sculptures, often fungi and extraordinarily life-like lichen.

Amanda : Moss and Lichen TQ 085 439, 2018, Built up layers of free machine embroidery (Photo credit, Fraser James)

Amanda Cobbett: Moss, bark and Lichen detail TQ 085 44, 2018, Built up layers of free machine embroidery, materials used; paper, silk, thread, dye, backing cloth, (Photo credit, Fraser James)

Artist and researcher Sarah Hearn makes artworks inspired by biology. She has made several lichen-inspired series of artworks. 

Sarah Hearn, Artificial Lichen Colony #8

10" x 15" cut photographs and watercolor, 2015

Sarah Hearn, Artificial Lichen Colony Collage #5

42" x 24" cut photographs, watercolor and graphite, 2016 (private commission)

Sarah Hearn, Artificial Lichen Colony #6

15" x 10" cut photographs and watercolor, 2016

There are whole worlds to contemplate in these extraordinary things if only we stop to look.