Celsius : A Life and Death by Degrees

This is the first, full-length English language biography of Swedish astronomer and Earth science pioneer Professor Anders Celsius.

It reveals what his extraordinary but tragically short life and career can teach us about our today and humanity’s tomorrow.

The book tells how Celsius’ study, travels and relationships at the peak of the European Enlightenment helped him to unlock fundamental mysteries of the natural world, and how his life offers vital lessons for now and the future. He was a mercurial thinker who ran out of time, but his discoveries, philosophy and personality still point a hopeful way forward.

Best remembered for inventing the Centigrade scale, Celsius’ name now frames humanity’s future in the international targets to limit average global temperature increases to no more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. As our world faces this life-or-death struggle, there’s much we can learn from Celsius. If we will listen.

Ian Hembrow is a former visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Since 2016, he has worked regularly in Sweden on two books for the WHO’s Uppsala Monitoring Centre, which is how he came across the story of Anders Celsius. He began working on the book in 2020 and traveled to the Arctic Circle to retrace the steps of Celsius's 1736-37 expedition to prove the shape of the Earth. In 2023 he published Ralph Edwards: Rare Events with Springer.