Don’t judge a play by its audience

There is a new book out about the sun — the bright thing in the sky, not the newspaper. It sounds very interesting. ‘Science Museum The Sun — One Thousand Years of Scientific Imagery’. You can get it from that place ‘Science Museum’, which I seemed to remember was once called the National Science Museum but which has now ridded itself of that hateful word ‘national’ as well as its unfashionable definite article. In the introduction to the book, the authors Harry Cliff and Katy Barrett write: ‘The images and texts featured here are almost always the product of collaborative work. While the name on the image is so often that of a white male from Europe or America, we must always remember the invisible contributors who were so often female, lower-class or non-western, and hard to uncover in the histories of both science and art.’

An interesting point. If these other contributors are ‘invisible’, then how can Harry and Katy be sure that they were there at all? A friend of mine, intrigued, has written to these eminences begging for details of the lower-class, ‘non-western’ or female collaborators who over the centuries have so aided our exploration of the sun.