The Goddess of Popular Science

Abstract

On the first of January, 1801, the Sicilian astronomer, Giuseppe Piazzi, discovered a new planet, which is the first known asteroid. The planets Mercury to Saturn carry the names of Roman gods and goddesses, and Uranus was also named in the same vein when it was identified as a planet around the end of the eighteenth century. Thus, it was small wonder that the new planet was given the name of Ceres, the Roman goddess of corn, particularly because she was connected to Sicily by several ties. Two or three years later, two noted chemists, Berzelius in Sweden and Klaproth in Germany, having analysed a mineral from a Swedish mine, discovered a new element of metallic properties. Metals and planets had been associated with celestial bodies since the Antiquity: gold with the Sun, silver with the Moon, iron with Mars and mercury still preserves its relationship to Mercury in a number of languages, including English. Thus, it was quite natural that the new element was called cerium after the newly discovered asteroid. (Later it turned out that the metallic sample was a mixture of two elements, cerium and lanthanum; this fact, however, caused no trouble in naming.)