Apollo's Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination - Hardcover

I've often thought how much fun it would be to teach a science course by taking my students for a walk, looking at what we see around us and exploring the deep structure of the universe as exemplified, for example, in a chunk of concrete or a tree leaf. This idea is way too loosey-goosey to get past a curriculum committee, but I'm glad to see that Michael Sims got a similar concept past the editors at Viking. The idea behind Apollo's Fire is to wander through time, calling up fragments of science, mythology and literature while exploring the relationship between human beings and daylight as the sun moves through the sky.

Like the ancient Greek tragedians, Sims restricts his narrative to a single day, beginning in the pre-dawn dark, continuing through high noon (with an appropriate nod to Gary Cooper), on to twilight and, again, to dark. At each point he indulges in an easy free association, calling our attention to what we see around us. The colors of dawn, for example, lead to a description of the way light interacts with atoms in the atmosphere -- the old "why is the sky blue?" question -- but also serve as an entry into the legend of Phaethon and Apollo. This, I remind you, is the story in which Phaethon, Apollo's son by a sea nymph, persuades Apollo to let him drive the golden chariot of the sun across the sky. Phaeton can't control the horses, and all sorts of damage is done, making Apollo, as Sims points out, the first parent who regretted giving a teenager the keys to the family vehicle.

This sort of weaving together of science and the more humane aspects of nature is what makes this book so interesting. At sunset, for example, Sims talks about the way the human eye adjusts to the dark, the difference between astronomical and civil twilight (the former ends when the sun is 18 degrees below the horizon, the latter at 6 degrees), and then drives home the significance of twilight by asking why there was never a television show called "The Noon Zone."

As is almost inevitable in a book of this scope, there are a few missteps -- Sims quotes uncritically the controversial notion that the Antarctic ozone hole is a cause of skin cancer in the temperate zones, for example -- but these are few and easily ignored. Because it skips so quickly from point to point, Apollo's Fire isn't the sort of book you'd pick up to learn science or mythology. I see it much more as one you'd keep at your side on a lazy summer day, dipping in occasionally as you undertake a leisurely contemplation of the world around you.

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