Robert Good How To Know the Starry Heavens (text fragments 2017 Cleveland Ironstone Mining Museum installation) is an attempt to distil the magical sense of wonder that is contained in Edward Irving's book of the same name. As such it is both unashamedly a homage to the quality and clarity of Irving's writing, and an attempt to revive his work for a new generation.
Written in 1905, the original How To Know the Starry Heavens is a book of astronomy for the layman that explains the vastness of the universe and the workings of the stars carefully and authoritatively, whilst always maintaining an almost childlike sense of wonder and marvel. Dedicated to "all true citizens of the Great Cosmos" it is a celebration of "the greatest of all the dramas".
I found my copy of the book in a the corner of a junk shop, discarded and unloved, but it was immediately obvious that this was a special find. The pictures alone transported me to another place and time - both back to the elegance of the Edwardian era and across to the outermost reaches of the known universe. But it is the language that is so evocative, so painterly. On any page he may be talking not just about far distant galaxies and the speed of light, but also about the priests of Odin, the eruption of Krakatoa or Eruptive Calcium Flocculi. Who could fail to be mesmerised by talk of stars "strewn through space like the blinding snowflakes of a Western blizzard" or "clinging together like Siamese twins"?
So Irving's book and his use of language situates the study of astronomy firmly within the context of the mind-boggling absurdity of our human existence. By using imagery, narrative and quotation alongside hard, uncompromising scientific fact (although the book is in places imaginatively descriptive he never once plays down the primacy of the scientific method), Irving goes beyond cold data to place us firmly but minutely within the night sky that he illuminates so well, and encourages us to share in his sense of wonder, excitement and possibility.
Irving wrote How To Know the Starry Heavens in 1905, the same year that Einstein revolutionised our thinking on Space and Time. As such, he is writing before our current modern age of astrophysics and so makes no direct references to such concepts as Relativity, the Big Bang, black holes, quantum mechanics, the existence of the planet Pluto or indeed Dark Matter.
It is fascinating to read, therefore, of how the universe was described in his time, which was an age that had rejected creationist myths and yet had no clear scientific consensus on how to replace them. Irving does not duck the big questions, however. For example, in a paragraph entitled "Outside Universes" Irving suggests something perhaps akin to what we would now call a multiverse:
The study of the visible Universe shows that it is composed of ascending series of similar systems. For example: (1) atoms appear to be spheroidal "star-clusters" of still smaller particles in motion; (2) suns and worlds are rotating spheroids built up of these atoms; (3) stellar systems are rotating speroids built up of suns and worlds; (4) the visible Universe appears to be a rotating spheroid built up of a Milky Way of stellar systems.
It is possible that this largest spheroid, which we call the Universe, may only be one out of innumerable similar spheroids, rotating at practically infinite distances from each other, and forming a still vaster rotating spheroid.
Irving writes under the heading "Immortality of the Universe" that "we now recognise no beginning and acknowledge no end", something that we would probably want to dispute and replace with a Big Bang and possible Big Crunch. And likewise Irving has no clear conception of Dark Matter as we now understand the term. However, in considering why the night sky is dark (and not lit up by an infinity of stars), Irving notes:
"... unless some cause produces a loss of light, the whole sky will be as bright as the Sun. As this is very far from being the case, ... it is not impossible that light itself may be intercepted by dark bodies in its way to us... "
Irving is always careful not to over-claim; you sense that he is trying to see his way in a fog that he is not sure will lift. As he says at the end of his discussion on "Outside Universes":
These speculations could be extended ad infinitum... It would, however, be a waste of time to consider them seriously, they only serve to show how little we really know of the great "Riddle of the Universe".