Dan Levitt is the author of 'What's Gotten Into You: The Story of Your Body's Atoms, from the Big Bang Through Last Night's Dinner.' In the Peace Corps in Kenya, Dan taught high school physics, biology, and world history in a remote village. Living close to Mount Kilimanjaro, walking by anthills as tall as people, and seeing snakes, hippos, and other wildlife, gave him an intense curiosity about the natural world. He returned to Philadelphia to take a job developing exhibits and videos at the Franklin Institute Science Museum. That led to an interest in documentary filmmaking. \n\nAfter getting an MFA, Dan moved to Boston and started his career writing, producing and directing documentaries for Discovery, Science, National Geographic, History, HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute), and others. His work has received numerous awards including two Cine-Golden Eagles, Emmy award nominations, and the coveted Spur Award for script writing from the Western Writers of America.\n\nWhile dreaming up films, Dan was seized by an idea for a book and decided to go for it. 'What's Gotten Into You,' published by HarperCollins is his first book.
We've only got to grips with how the planets in our solar system formed in the last 100 years. In the extract below from"What's Gotten Into You" , Dan Levitt looks at the Soviet mathematician who spent a decade working on a problem that most astronomers had given up on, and — when he finally solved it — was met with disinterest and skepticism.
Explaining how our planets were created seemed so difficult that, by the 1950s, most astronomers had given up. Their theories appeared to lead nowhere. Two centuries before, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace had begun, promisingly enough, by correctly theorizing that gravity reeled in a massive spinning cloud of gas and dust so tightly that fierce temperatures and pressures ignited it into a star — our sun.
Nevertheless, in the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, a young physicist decided to tackle the problem head on — with mathematics. His name was Viktor Safronov. Safronov was slight in stature and struggled with malaria, a legacy of his military training in Azerbaijan during World War II. He was modest, humble, and uncommonly smart. At Moscow University, he distinguished himself with advanced degrees in physics and mathematics.
Safronov began by assuming that our solar system first took shape when the vast primordial cloud of dust and gas, which in the previous chapter we left floating in space, was transformed by the relentless pull of gravity into a star. Almost all of it became our sun. But lingering remnants were too far away to be dragged into the sun, yet not distant enough to fully escape its clutches.
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