Once Round the Sun, Ronald Fraser

As a young Friar I was fascinated with a series of kids science and history books called the "All About" books. Several of the scientific ones drew on new research (new for the time they were written, anyway, which was about 15-20 years before I was reading them) done during the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58. That project itself was highly interesting to the same young Friar.

Just before it began, Dr. Ronald Fraser of the International Council of Scientific Unions wrote a short book outlining what research the IGY was intended to conduct, what kinds of questions it was intended to answer and how some of the projects would work. The first section of the book covers a variety of scientific questions that at the time needed more exploration and research, and the second covers several of the projects designed to explore and research them, as well as some of the other plans that went into the IGY project.

Fraser also outlines how some cooling of political tensions following the Korean War ceasefire allowed for joint projects between rival superpowers the United States and the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev was just as adamant a Communist as his predecessor Josef Stalin but began with a slightly less pugnacious stance, meaning scientific cooperation was a possibility.

While the highest profile projects of the IGY might have been the respective Sputnik and Explorer launches, some of its most lasting impact might have been international agreements limiting any nation's presence in Antarctica to primarily scientific endeavors. Since he's previewing the IGY, Fraser can only hint at some of these plans.

Once Around the Sun is, in many ways a little bit of an artifact itself, showing where some of the different scientific fields were in the late 1950s and what kinds of questions they were trying to answer. Project creators also hoped the cooperation could further lesson international tension and perhaps lead to wider cooperation between rival powers. That aim proved less successful, although it did offer some wry fuel for Donald Fagen's lightly sarcastic 1982 "I.G.Y." tune. In that vein, it's interesting and worth scanning since full histories of the IGY itself seem to be scarce. And wherever he resides within my head these days, the young Friar was highly interested to see what lay behind one of those childhood fascinations.