Montréal, 19 May 2006

Here is a (likely incomplete) list of extracts from the Great Moments in the History of Solar Physics, totalling over 100 lines of text, cut-and-paste directly from the site by a "scientific journalist" named David Whitehouse, presumably to accelerate the writing of his book:

The Sun: A Biography, 2005, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN-13 978-0470-09297-2 and ISBN-10 0-470-09297-1

Doing a Google searches on those strings (including the double quotes) will invariably land you somewhere in the HAO "Great Moments" pages. Page numbers pertain to the paperback version of the first edition.

• p. 51 "While the solar corona is visible at any solar eclipse," [ Great Moment 968; with some minor deletions and rewording]
• p. 58 "world view that was destroyed in the sixteenth and seventeenth" [ Great Moment 1543]
• p. 104 "The oldest records of sunspots are found in the" [ Great Moment ca. 800 BC]
• p. 106 "four astronomers more or less simultaneously" [ Great Moment 1610]
• p. 119 "The universally opinionated Galileo proposed, with unusual reservation" [ Great Moment 1774-1801]
• p. 125-126 "The rapid development of spectroscopic techniques in the second half of the nineteenth century" [ Great Moment 1858-1859]
• p. 150 "Hale and his colleagues went on to show that large sunspot pairs" [ Great Moment 1908, and 1919]
• p. 159 "The first attempts at direct measurements were carried out independently and more or less simultaneously" [ Great Moments 1838, and 1881]

Numerous illustrations in the book that do not list a source also appear to have been downloaded straight from the Great Moments Pages. In these Pages the sources are always listed; but not in Mr Whitehouse's production...

I should perhaps feel gratified that Mr Whitehouse used, almost always verbatim, the prose of a non-native English speaker whose English orthograph, moreover, was corrupted by years of living amongst American revolutionaries. But somehow I don't, go figure...

Paul Charbonneau
Professeur Titulaire
Canada Research Chair in Solar Physics
Département de Physique
Université de Montréal