author : Robyn Arianrhod

When Newton pubiished his revolutionary theory of gravity, in his monumental Principia of 1687, most of his Continental peers rejected it. But the brilliant French aristocrat Émilie du Châtelet and some other early eighteenth-century Enlightenment colleagues realized the Principia had changed everything. Émilie collaborated with her lover, Voltaire, in furthering Newton’s ideas in France, and her translation of the Principia is still the accepted French version of this groundbreaking work. Almost a century later, in Scotland, Mary Somerville taught herself mathematics, and rose from genteel poverty to become a world authority on Newtonian physics. She was fêted by the famous French Newtonian, Pierre Simon Laplace, whose six-volume Celestial Mechanics was considered the greatest intellectual achievement since Principia. Laplace’s work was the basis of Mary's first book, Mechanism of the Heaven; it is a bittersweet irony that this book, written by a woman denied entry to university because of her gender, remained an advanced university astronomy text for the next century.

Combining biography, history, and popular science, Seduced by Logic not only reveals the fascinating story of two incredibly talented women, but also brings to life a period of dramatic poetical and scientific change. Arianrhod illuminates the science behind the story of Émilie du Châtelet and Mary Somerville, whose accomplishments forever altered the perception of women in science, and explores the intimate links between the unfolding Newtonian revolution and the expansion of intellectual liberty.