Kathleen Lonsdale was a groundbreaking chemist who was instrumental in developing the science of crystallography. She was also a midlife convert to Quakerism who campaigned for peace and prison reform. Horrified by the dropping of the first atomic bombs, Lonsdale felt that the entire scientific community was now tainted by the violence it had enabled. Published in 1957, Is Peace Possible? was her attempt to make amends for this communal guilt by demonstrating that science can bring peace as well as war, and can address the ‘big questions’ generally left to the humanities.
In crystalline language and logic honed from a lifetime of relying on the sharpness of her mind to cut through barriers of class and gender, Kathleen Lonsdale’s Is Peace Possible? is a work of quiet, elegant sanity that refuses to be bullied by the received wisdom of war’s inevitability. It is a snapshot of a particular moment in history, but its themes are eternally relevant, and even more necessary now than when it was written.
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Maria Popova thinks and writes about our search for meaning – sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She has written some very long books (Figuring and Traversal) and some very short books (The Snail with the Right Heart and The Coziest Place on the Moon), and her show The Universe in Verse – a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry – has also become a book the length of a day on Saturn.
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