Understanding the Northern Lights
When the aurora borealis appeared in the skies of 18th-century Europe, Enlightenment scientists first turned to history to understand it.
Not long after nightfall on 6 March 1716 a dazzling display of lights reilluminated the skies over most of Europe, from Scotland and Sweden to as far south as Spain, painting the heavens with streaks of crimson, purple, and green. William Whiston, the English mathematician and author of theological controversies, collected and published firsthand testimonies from across England of the ‘surprizing Meteor’ seen that night. His witnesses described vast ‘pillars of fire’, ‘columns’, ‘fiery Beams’, and ‘pyramids’ ablaze in the northern sky, displaying ‘all the Colours of the Rainbow’ and descending perpendicular towards the horizon. Others likened the phenomenon to the sight of aerial armies locked in a titanic battle, evoking martial metaphors of spears and burning lances. The astronomer Edmond Halley, in an article published the following year in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, noted how:
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