@hendric @romancebooks @bookstodon @herhandsmyhands it’s a fictional historical romance, so it’s science as understood in 1831: mostly astronomy, physics, & the first concepts of Babbage’s analytical engine. But primarily it’s a fictionalized account of Mary Somerville translating the Marquis de Laplace’s “Mécanique Céleste” as “The Mechanism of the Heavens” -if she’d been gay, single, & 23yo. (She was 51yo, married twice, & a mother by 1831.) #historyofscience

@hendric @romancebooks @bookstodon @herhandsmyhands note — Somerville was also one of the first English speakers to drop Newtonian physics and use modern mathematics (ie “the calculus”) instead.