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Our knowledge of the universe, from the atomic level to the galactic, changed beyond recognition between the sixteenth century and into the twenty-first. In this book Allan Chapman takes up the story from where he left off in Stargazers, tracing the ground-breaking discoveries and developments of the last three centuries. Besides the big names - Halley, the Herschels, Einstein, Hubble, Hoyle, and Lovell - he includes a host of colourful figures, from wealthy telescope-builders to working-men astronomers, to popular astronomical lecturers, along with the many women, from Caroline Herschel to Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who made fundamental discoveries. He also discusses humanity's perennial fascination with aliens and life on other worlds. He then turns to the great observatories of the United States, Jodrell Bank, the 'space race', and the explosion of interest in astronomy that followed Sir Patrick Moore's first appearance on The Sky at Night in 1957.
Info autore
Dr Allan Chapman is a historian of science at Oxford University, with special interests in the history of astronomy and of medicine and the relationship between science and Christianity. As well as University teaching, he lectures widely, has written a dozen books and numerous academic articles, and written and presented two TV series, Gods in the Sky and Great Scientists, besides taking part in many other history of science TVdocumentaries and in The Sky at Night with Sir Patrick Moore. He has received honorary doctorates and awards from the Universities of Central Lancashire, Salford, and Lancaster, and in 2015 was presented with the Jackson-Gwilt Medal by the Royal Astronomical Society. Among his books are Slaying the Dragons. Destroying Myths in the History of Science and Faith (Lion Hudson, 2013), Stargazers: Copernicus, Galileo, the Telescope, and the Church. The Astronomical Renaissance, 1500-1700 (Lion, 2014), and Physicians, Plagues, and Progress. The History of Western Medicine from Antiquity to Antibiotics (Lion, 2016). He is also the author of thescientific biographies England's Leonardo. Robert Hooke and the Seventeenth-Century Scientific Revolution (Institute of Physics, 2005), Mary Somerville and the World of Science (Canopus, 2004; Springer, 2015), and The Victorian Amateur Astronomer. Independent Astronomical Research in Britain, 1820-1920 (Wiley-Praxis, 1998; revised edn. Gracewing, 2017).
Riassunto
For stargazers and science enthusiasts alike, this history of the field of Astronomy follows the lives of its key movers and shakers. The people who opened up God's cosmos.
