Astronomy: A History of Man´s Investigation of the Universe
Year: 1962 Language: english Author: Fred Hoyle Genre: Handbook Publisher: Doubleday & Company, Inc. Format: PDF Quality: Scanned pages Pages count: 327 Description: The astronomer Fred Hoyle starts this book with the ancients and gives a feel for how people first started to understand the regularities of the heavens. It starts with sundials and standing stones and simple observational gear for measuring the declination and right ascension of stars, though Hoyle avoids cluttering things with technical vocabulary. The story continues with the triumph of the geocentric system and its challenges. Eventually, the heliocentric system takes over and the age of optical instruments leads to new data, new models and new understanding. The mathematics are minimal, but important concepts are introduced nicely. Written in the 1960s, there is a good discussion of spectroscopy, radio astronomy, stellar evolution and the fusion reactions that power the stars. Even better, Hoyle explains how we learned what we know. A lot has happened since the 1960s. We have telescopes of immense size on earth and in orbit. Our sensors cover a much broader range of the spectrum. We have sent probes to explore the planets and their moons. This book doesn't cover any of that, but in some ways that is a strength. Hoyle presents a good history, taking the reader up to a modern era, but before the great explosion of discoveries of the last few decades. It's a comprehensible story. The giants' shoulders weren't quite as tall as they seem these days.
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Astronomy: A History of Man´s Investigation of the Universe
Language: english
Author: Fred Hoyle
Genre: Handbook
Publisher: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Format: PDF
Quality: Scanned pages
Pages count: 327
Description: The astronomer Fred Hoyle starts this book with the ancients and gives a feel for how people first started to understand the regularities of the heavens. It starts with sundials and standing stones and simple observational gear for measuring the declination and right ascension of stars, though Hoyle avoids cluttering things with technical vocabulary. The story continues with the triumph of the geocentric system and its challenges. Eventually, the heliocentric system takes over and the age of optical instruments leads to new data, new models and new understanding. The mathematics are minimal, but important concepts are introduced nicely.
Written in the 1960s, there is a good discussion of spectroscopy, radio astronomy, stellar evolution and the fusion reactions that power the stars. Even better, Hoyle explains how we learned what we know. A lot has happened since the 1960s. We have telescopes of immense size on earth and in orbit. Our sensors cover a much broader range of the spectrum. We have sent probes to explore the planets and their moons. This book doesn't cover any of that, but in some ways that is a strength. Hoyle presents a good history, taking the reader up to a modern era, but before the great explosion of discoveries of the last few decades. It's a comprehensible story. The giants' shoulders weren't quite as tall as they seem these days.
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