Casual stargazers are familiar with many classical figures and asterisms composed of bright stars (e.g., Orion and the Plough), but this book reveals not just the constellations of today but those of yesteryear. The history of the human…
In this extraordinary work, Donald J. Wilcox seeks to discover an approach to narrative and history consistent with the discontinuous, relative time of the twentieth century. He shows how our B.C./A.D. system, intimately connected to Newtonian…
Every amateur astronomer can easily recognize most of the constellations, but how many of us know the story behind them? What myths did the Ancient Greeks weave around the mighty hunter Orion that places him so prominently in the sky? Did you know…
Spanning centuries of top-notch science, bitter rivalry, outright fraud, and self-delusion, the author weaves a narrative centred around the brilliant, often eccentric, and controversial pioneers of high-pressure research. These new alchemists have…
In this book, the author recounts the development of celestial knowledge from prehistory to Stephen Hawking and the Hubble Space Telescope, from the megalithic observatory at Stonehenge, through the great early civilizations of the Maya, Egypt, and…
What are some of the connections that bind us to the stars? How have these connections been established? And how have people all around the world and throughout time reacted to the night sky, the sun and moon, in their poetry, mythology, rituals,…
Radio astronomy was born during the Second World War, but as this book explains, the history of early Dutch radio astronomy is in several respects rather anomalous in comparison to the development of radio astronomy in other countries. The author…