T颅he sun is a star, and not a particularly remarkable one. This everyday observation conceals a powerful contradiction in our daily experience. For us Earth-dwellers, it is not just any old star, it is our star, the star which utterly dominates existence on our planet. Whatever their vital statistics, all the other stars in the sky are mere extrapolations of it: our sun literally outshines them all.
And yet for most of human history the sun has been an ineffable mystery. You can feel it, but can鈥檛 touch it; you can鈥檛 see without it, but you can鈥檛 look at it. Until the 20th century, science had no real way to describe its vast temperatures and pressures, or even what it was made of.
, a new show at London鈥檚 Science Museum, attempts to capture our long and contradictory relationship with the Sun. Its curators face a tricky job shedding new light for both astronomy buffs and complete beginners.
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Ancients鈥� focus
Starting in prehistory makes sense. Faced with an object both blindingly obvious and extremely difficult to observe, it鈥檚 not surprising that the ancients focused more on its motions than on its disc. Nor that they explained these motions as divine transfigurations of mundane modes of transportation: a Bronze Age sculpture dredged from a Danish bog shows a golden sun, decorated with fine spirals, borne in a horse-drawn chariot.
The show jumps forward to the birth of modern astronomy and timekeeping, with gods giving way to geometry, geocentricity to heliocentricity and sundials to clockwork. Beautiful though the orreries and timepieces are, the content of this section feels over-familiar; doesn鈥檛 every astronomical show begin this way?
The next section is less obvious, returning to sun-worshipping, albeit of a more modern sort: the 20th-century fixation with sunlight as a health-giving tonic. A picture of scantily-clad skiers seems ludicrous until you learn about early notions that the bright Alpine sunlight would fortify their immune systems against disease, particularly TB. Nearby stands a mirrored cabinet full of lightbulbs, which allowed the gentry to bask more discreetly.
Divine cures
It鈥檚 easy to see sublimated yearning for a divine cure in these displays, later dispelled by our scientific understanding of the violence wrought on human skin by ultraviolet radiation. And it鈥檚 also chilling to imagine a return to dependence on such remedies in a post-antibiotic age.
Attempts have also been made to turn the sun鈥檚 power to more industrial ends. A 19th-century solar collector, with its mirrored dish, is displayed along with a wire basket in which an egg might once have been cooked to dazzle spectators.
Then there鈥檚 a tokamak fusion reactor, which stands gleaming like the very avatar of the white heat of technology 鈥� but also the white elephant that fusion鈥檚 sceptics allege it to be.
Less ostentatious, but more quietly impressive, is a nearby array of solar cells, whose diversity suggests a revolution whose time already might have come, rather than perpetually dangling twenty years into the future.
All these down-to-earth sections are diverting enough, but somewhat disjointed and almost shying away from anything too dramatic. A pleasant way to pass the time, but less revelatory than one might hope.
Volcanic face
Fortunately, the show鈥檚 closing section finally looks directly at the sun. It ranges from Athanasius Kircher鈥檚 volcanic portrait of its face 鈥� on which a 鈥渉ere be dragons鈥� sign would not seem incongruous 鈥� to the spectroscopy that revealed its composition and hinted at its workings, and finally to the spots-and-all ultraviolet portraits taken by generations of spacecraft daring to draw ever nearer to our star.
The final exhibit, mesmerising footage from NASA鈥檚 Solar Dynamics Observatory, accompanied by a basso profundo soundtrack, reveals the sun to be a place of titanic violence.
Science is often accused of stripping the world of its beautiful mysteries. But as this show demonstrates, staring at the sun gives the lie to that.
The ancients could glimpse and imagine it, but not comprehend it. We are starting to look at it and 鈥渢ouch鈥� it, with technologised eyes and hands, and through them we are beginning to understand it. But the furious majesty we have discovered is far harder to imagine than a golden disc in a cart.
, Science Museum, London, to 6 May 2019
