If I Am Right, and I Know I Am
Hanne Strager’s book offers a compelling portrait of Inge Lehmann as a funny, selectively extroverted figure and one of the greatest women scientists of her era, told largely through her letters to family, friends and colleagues. Through the prism of Lehmann’s life, this is a well-documented account of the social restraints women faced in the early 1900s, vividly capturing the intellectual atmosphere of the time, when even obtaining a university degree could be controversial for women.
It is particularly interesting to see how many well-known names in physics and geophysics shared the same timeline — and were sometimes close colleagues or acquaintances — including Niels Bohr, Harold Jeffreys, J. J. Thomson, Beno Gutenberg, Andrija Mohorovičić and Marie Tharp. Strager carefully reconstructs the journey leading to Lehmann’s discovery of Earth’s inner core through reading thousands of seismograms and honing her analytical skills, alongside showing how transformative ideas were often met with scepticism and sometimes dismissed simply because they came from a woman. The parallels with other pioneers, such as Tharp, reinforce how frequently women’s contributions were underestimated despite their scientific rigor, making the reader wonder how many scientific voices may have been lost over time. The impact of the World Wars is also striking as an era when many young and brilliant scientists were drawn away from research and sent to battlefields.
There are moments that gave me goosebumps, especially when reading about the scientific community finally acknowledging the validity of women scientists’ discoveries. The book offers a detailed and deeply personal account of Lehmann’s revolutionary contributions to the field, standing as an important narrative about the realities of patriarchal societies and the extraordinary perseverance required to break through systemic barriers in a male-dominated sector.
Ultimately, the book provides a powerful portrayal of how formidable Lehmann was: a woman who dedicated her life to understanding the Earth and fought against societal constraints to become a century-defining scientific figure who famously declared “if I am right, and I know I am” before revealing one of the planet’s deepest secrets.
Reviewed by Rema Vaishali
DETAILS
BY: Hanne Strager (2025) Columbia University Press, 320 pp. (hbk)
ISBN: 9780231218641
Price: £25, available from Geoscientist’s bookshop
