Sunflowers
Alessia Tami (University of Zurich)
A Magnetic Theory for Sunflowers
Many new discoveries about magnetism were made during the seventeenth century. Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher thought that magnetism was the force behind what he considered occult (or hidden) phenomena.
Click here to find out more about Athanasius Kircher.
The clockwise motion of sunflowers was one of Kircher’s favorite examples of magnetism between an earthly organism and the Sun (the honesty plant, also known as “lunaria” or “silver dollar plant,” was a contrary example of magnetic affinity with the Moon). The title page of Kircher’s Magneticum naturae regnum (Nature’s Magnetic Kingdom) depicts a sunflower following the Sun in a clockwise motion, signaled by the sundial, in the bottom left corner. On the right, the lunaria follows the phases of the Moon.