Mars, the Moon, and Myths: A Conversation with Poet and Historian of Science Matt Shindell
By: Matt Tontonoz
ASU Bio and Society grads go on to do amazing things. It’s always fun to catch up with them at meetings, to find out what they’ve been up of late.
Last November, at the annual History of Science Society meeting, I had the chance to interview Matthew Shindell, a historian of science with the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Matt’s work focuses on the history of the earth and planetary sciences, with an emphasis on the development of research programs in these fields during the Cold War.
A graduate of ASU, the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and UC-San Diego, Matt is the author or editor of five books, including the recently published Lunar: A History of the Moon in Myths, Maps, and Matter (University of Chicago Press, 2024), about which he shares more below.
You have a undergraduate background in biology. How did you come to write books about outer space?
When I started my Master's degree in Biology and Society at ASU, I thought I was going to do a history of biology project about Victorian eugenics. After a while, I started to think it wasn’t possible to do that project because I didn't have a lot of funding for going to archives in Britain or Europe. So, I started thinking about doing something more contemporary and more American to make it easier on myself in terms of getting sources. You have to remember this was 20 years ago when there wasn't as much digitized material that you could use.
At the time, I was also working part-time in ASU’s media relations office. Through that job, I learned about work that folks at ASU were doing in Mars exploration. So, I started following them around mainly to write the press releases I’d been assigned, and then realized at some point this would actually make a really good Master's thesis—thinking about, how did geology become a planetary science? How did it go from being the science that was formed around understanding this planet to being extended to the other planets? And what did that mean for how geology itself changed in this period? So that was a fun project that became my Master’s thesis.
What did you do next?
After I finished the Master’s degree at ASU, I went to UC-San Diego to work with Naomi Oreskes. I was looking for someone who knew the history of geology and who was doing exciting work in that area. In the UCSD archives I found the Harold Urey papers during one of my research seminars. The seminar was focused was religion and science. I had read in Dan Kevles's book, The Physicists, that Urey’s father was a minister and that Urey had abandoned religion for science when his father died. This turned out to be only partly true.
Urey’s father was a lay minister in the Church of the Brethren in the late 19th century. The Brethren at that time were very much like the Amish or Mennonite—they didn't have professional ministers, but instead they had lay ministers who would travel a lot from one church to another. And they were very agrarian.
The family had moved to California when Urey was just a baby, hoping the climate would be good for the tuberculosis that was killing Urey’s father. But things went from bad to worse over the next couple years. Urey’s father died very young, leaving the family destitute. Urey barely knew him. But what Kevles had said about Urey losing his religion shortly thereafter turned out not to be so true. While Urey did shape himself into a secular figure and became a very cosmopolitan man of science, winning the Nobel Prize in the 1930s for his work with heavy hydrogen, he never really lost his religious identity, although he masked it.
In my dissertation, I looked at how his career was shaped by the big events in American science that happened over the course of the 20th century, including World War I, World War II, and the emergence of the Space Age, the founding of NASA’s lunar exploration program, but then also traced how religion shaped his attitudes towards why he was doing the science that he was doing, including his work on the origin of life.
Especially after World War II and the Cold War, Urey participated in efforts to internationalize the secrets of the bomb and to promote world governance over atomic weapons. After these efforts failed, he made a hard turn toward religion. He didn't start going to church again or anything like that. But he started really making the case in his public speeches for the importance of religious morals and religious attitudes. He wouldn't make an argument for the truth of the creation story or biblical literalism itself. In fact, he argued against that. Nonetheless, he thought that the morals that religion taught could not be taught by any other source, certainly not by science. So he started advocating this relationship between science and religion, in which science provides the story of the creation, a secular story of creation, while the Bible continues to teach us why it's important to be better than our base instincts and to love one another and protect one another.
This work led to my first book, The Life and Science of Harold C. Urey (Chicago, 2019).
When the opportunity came up to apply for a job at Smithsonian, I applied for that because I had never seen another job ad where they were looking for someone who did things that I actually did. Even though I’d never planned on working in a museum, it looked like that was a good opportunity for someone with the skillset and subject matter knowledge that I had.
And then you eventually returned to your interest in Mars?
Right. So after I published the Urey biography, which was a revised and expanded version of what I produced during the dissertation, one of the projects I started thinking about was how things have progressed over the last 50-60 years of robotic planetary exploration. What has this meant for our understanding of ourselves and our planet and our place in our solar system, and the history of the solar system? I wrote up a book proposal. I sent it around and ended up getting a contract with the University of Chicago Press, which was the same press that I published my first book with.
And then COVID happened.
I had to rethink what that Mars book would look like, because I wasn't going to be able to go to any archives. And my ability to interview people would be more limited; I wouldn't be able to go and see their labs and talk to them in person. So I thought, what about a more synthetic project? Could I write a book about how humans have thought about Mars and how it reflects their views of themselves and their place in the universe that goes from ancient times up to the present? I started thinking through that and ended up writing the book For the Love of Mars: A Human History of the Red Planet (Chicago, 2023). Each chapter looks at a different time period and thinks about how Mars reflects an entire worldview, even a cosmological understanding of the human place in the universe.
Can you give an example of what you found?
At least since the 17th century, Mars has been a very popular site for thinking about life on other worlds. Even before we had a genre of science fiction, people were producing these imagined journeys in which they thought about what the surface of Mars would be like, what they might see if they could stand there and look around. One of the examples that I give in the book is this Jesuit priest, Athanasius Kircher, who is famous in the history of science for having been an incredibly prolific but enigmatic scientific figure. He was living in the same time as Galileo. He was younger than Galileo, but he arrived in Rome not long after Galileo's trial and was teaching astronomy and other subjects at the College of Rome. In his teaching, it doesn't look like he ever took up a Copernican position or anything like that, but when he wrote this imagined journey into the solar system he makes us stop at all of the different planetary bodies, including Mars. He is one of the first thinkers to treat Mars as a physical world that you could stand on and walk on. But his understanding of Mars is completely influenced by his understanding of alchemy and astrology and the influences of the planets and the purpose that the planets serve in this world machine that Christians had come to believe in.
So, when he lands on Mars it's this very smelly, ugly, hot planet. It has a malign influence on humans according to Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos. It’s understood that it causes plague and disease when it’s in the right confluence with other constellations. And so, when he comes to Mars, it’s a terrible place. It makes him angry. He starts to feel like he wants to start a fight. And it’s not until the angel who is guiding him on this journeygives him an antidote that he can get back to his normal calm self.
Now, on the one hand, if we think about this in terms of scientific progress, it’s a step forward to think about Mars as a place that’s physical that you can stand on, that's not made of ether. But on the other hand, it’s still in that late medieval, early modern view of the planets in terms of the part that they play in that world machine. Mars mainly exists to have its influence on earth, and so its physicality reflects that. And this is probably a good reflection of how old and new ideas coexisted and intermingled for many years in the wake of Galileo and Kepler.
Your most recent book is about the moon. How did that come about?
After I finished the Mars book, I learned about a project about the moon that was being developed by the press Thames and Hudson. They are known for publishing beautifully illustrated large-format books. They wanted to do a book about the moon that would use as its basis these maps that were made by the US Geologic Survey in the lead up to and during the Apollo missions to the moon. There are 44 of them and they're visually stunning, very colorful and beautiful.
Thames and Hudson was looking for someone who could think about essays that would talk about the science of the moon, the cultural significance of the moon, the moon in various different cultures and periods of time, the moon in art, the moon in film and music. They already had some authors in mind for some of those essays, but they needed someone to unify things and identify who should write the other essays, and someone who knew the history of planetary geology and could tell the history of why these maps exist and why they’re significant. And so my editor at Chicago, Karen Darling, introduced me to them, and that’s how I got involved. It was a really fun project. Especially coming off of the Mars book, it was fun to think about the moon in a similar way, and also to be able to think about all of the wonderful colleagues whom I could ask to write essays for the book on different topics.
We have an essay about the far side of the moon that was written by a scientist. We have essays by historians of science and technology, historians of art, historians of Egyptian science, Mayan science. We have a Lakota artist who wrote an essay about the moon in Lakota culture. So it was a lot of fun bringing those folks together and putting them in one book. The title is Lunar: A History of the Moon in Myths, Maps, and Matter (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
What’s something interesting you learned about the moon in the course of your research?
One of the reasons I was excited to work on a project about the moon after finishing the Mars book was that in Kircher’s view, and in the medieval view that came before him, the moon had a very special significance in that world-machine through which God exerts his will on earth. Because the world between us and the moon, the sublunar world, is the world of change, the world of the four elements that Aristotle had described, it’s where all life and all change, all birth, all growth, all decay, everything happens below the moon. And then everything beyond the moon is the perfect unchangeable ether. So the moon had special significance for the natural philosopher because of that. The sun and moon were treated as the two most important planets—they considered them planets—in the whole system. They had these kind of twin effects. The sun caused birth, caused growth, caused the seasons, warm summers, etc. The moon was more responsible for things that were wet and cold, like the tides and the vapors. So the sun and the moon worked together, and then the planets made their contributions. But the moon was always kind of special in that regard, in that some natural philosophers thought that the moon collected all the influences of the planets and then projected them down onto the earth.
You and Jane Maienschein go back a long ways. Tell me about your relationship.
Jane really is responsible for my becoming a historian of science. It’s not just that I took courses from her, got turned onto the history of science through that, and then worked with her. It’s also that she's one of the most encouraging mentors that I think I've ever had. I think I was 19 years old when I first met her and took her courses. And she took me to this meeting [the annual History of Science Society meeting] as an undergrad and introduced me to all of the different topics that people were exploring in history of science. And when I wanted to change my topic as a Master's student and move away from history of biology and do history of planetary geology, she encouraged me to do that. She didn’t try to make me continue in biology because that’s what she does, and that’s where her expertise is. She really gave me the freedom to pursue what I thought was important and what I was engaged with.
When I was an undergrad, I discovered history of science, but I also discovered poetry and creative writing and took a lot of creative writing courses. One of my mentors at ASU was the poet Norman Dubie, who just died not too long ago. He encouraged me to apply to MFA programs for poetry. And when I told Jane about that, I told her I want to get a PhD in history of science, but I also want to explore poetry. I said, Do you think I can do the PhD and then do an MFA? And she said, No, you need to do the MFA first and then come back and do history of science. Because if you do history of science first and try to make a career out of it, you'll never go and do the MFA. And so that’s what I did. With her encouragement, I applied to MFA programs.
Did your training as a poet influence the way you approached the Mars and Moon books?
Oh, yes, absolutely. I think it kind of explains why I am so engaged when I read the writing of these scientists from earlier periods. The way they construct sentences is often very different from the way we do today. And the poet in me maybe loves to think about that and engage with that. But also, I think that training allows me to look at the works of Dante and Kircher, and other writers who used poetry to build worlds and to explore what was known or unknown in conversation with the science of their day. I find it all completely fascinating.
Matthew Shindell received his BS and MA from the Biology and Society Program at ASU, his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa, and his PhD in History/Science Studies from the University of California, San Diego. He is Curator of Planetary Science and Exploration at the National Air and Space Museum and the current Secretary of the History of Science Society.