There is something comical about the fact that the planet named for the goddess of love once drove the scientific world to its knees.
During a transit, Venus passes between Earth and the Sun, becoming a small black dot against the solar disk. These events are among astronomy’s rarest spectacles. They come in pairs eight years apart, then disappear for more than a century. The last one was in 2012, when Venus crossed the face of the Sun as a small black dot, its journey livestreamed around the world. Scientists and enthusiasts watched something they would never see again in their lifetimes – from terraces with eclipse glasses or on their laptops from the comfort of their homes. But a quarter of a millennium ago, scientists didn’t have that luxury. Astronomers risked everything to see this small shadow in the name of science. The quest was romantic in the classic sense: obsessive, impractical and grand. As with the era’s poetry and painting, its romance was inseparable from the empire that produced it.
It all started when I walked into a tiny museum at Harvard University.
m a science writer, which is what happens when you love physics but physics doesn’t quite love you back. I have a master’s degree in it, but the intuition for research never really hit me right. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something I could give science. Most people don’t see science the way I do – as something interesting, beautiful, even emotional. So, naturally, I did what no tortured artist has ever done before: I started writing about my unrequited love. I wanted people to see the science that I see, and feel it the way I do.
If I got lucky, I’d find one of those stories that make science feel human. Stories of people who cared too much. The ones who spent years chasing starlight or boiling mercury, convinced that, if they just measured carefully enough, everything would finally make sense. They believed the Universe could be solved with mathematics and patience.
I couldn’t tell if I was drawn to those old stories because they were profound or just nostalgic – and the Putnam Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts (less like a museum than a well-lit storage space) was where I would find out. The place was so little known that I was the only person there, aside from the woman at the front desk, and the quiet gave me the time to notice what became, to me, the funniest thing in the room: almost every instrument I looked at pointed to the same thing. A telescope built to track Venus. A map charting her path across the Sun. A pendulum clock precisely calibrated to catch the exact moment of her transit. Venus, Venus, Venus. The fact that so many astronomers seemed to be obsessed with Venus was ironic.
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