Scientific American craps out.

Just in case you haven’t noticed yet next Wednesday an astronomical “once in a lifetime” “event of the century”, a transit of Venus, will take place. This has naturally provoked a flood of media interest resulting in lots and lots of reports running the gamut from good to totally miserable with the average, from the history of science standpoint, tending to ropey at best. Under normal circumstances I might have taken one or the other of these articles to task here but as I was busy writing my own Transit of Venus article, for a local astronomy society journal, and public lecture, held last Wednesday in Nürnberg, I didn’t really feel like blogging about it as well. However the appallingly bad book extract on the subject posted yesterday on the Scientific American website made me change my mind. Just how bad is it? This post is a very serious candidate for the worst piece of history of science writing of the year. In fact any competitor is going to have to try very, very hard to beat it for this title. [To find out more go here]

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