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ENCHANTMENT OF URANIA, THE
Massimo Capaccioli
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World Scientific Publishing Company 
Naturwissenschaften, Medizin, Informatik, Technik / Naturwissenschaften allgemein
Description
Today we know much about the sky: how stars are born, how they live and die, and how the universe as a whole evolves. We have learned of the existence of another type of matter, indifferent to light and yet decisive for the formation of galaxies, and we have a hint of a dark energy that since the last 4.5 billion years has taken over the control of the cosmos. We postulated and then discovered and even photographed black holes and listened to the faint rustle of the space-time ripple produced when these monsters devour each other. We reached these astonishing results (recognized by a bunch of Nobel Prizes and filling every day the media with wonders for the eyes and the mind) by the marriage of physics and astronomy that unified the Earth with the sky and then by the leap forward of science and technology in the Twentieth Century. This rich heritage has ancient roots. It was built by accumulating discoveries with errors, observations with fantasies, myths, and superstitions with flashes of genius, over a span of millennia, since Homo sapiens, turning his eyes to the immutable and perfect sky, began to ask questions.
The book is a narration of the answers to these questions that had evolved over time: a progressive path, inserted in the general history, with some second thoughts and many obstacles. This is a saga of men and machines where greatness sometimes mixes with misery and passion often borders on sacrifice and even martyrdom. Why should we know it? Because our current knowledge is the result of these efforts and of the preconceptions that accompanied them.
The challenge has been to present this complex and intricate subject without resorting to any formulas, so that it can be accessible to a wide audience of curious people, including high school and university students and in general all those who normally keep themselves informed of scientific things. A rich bibliography has also been added in the appendix for those wishing to learn more on one or more topics.
Contents:
- Preface
- Introduction: The First Time
- With the Naked Eye: Astronomy and Cosmology of the Ancients
- An Introvert, a Reactionary, and a Visionary: Copernicus, Kepler, and Brahe
- The Glass Eye: Galilei's Telescope and Its Discoveries
- The Heroic Enthusiasts: The Dawn of the Telescopic Sky Survey
- The Heavenly Laboratory: Cassini, Huygens, Bradley, and the Measures of Time and Light
- God Said, Let Newton Be! The Reflecting Telescope and Light and Gravity
- Beyond the Pillars of Hercules: Herschel and the New Planets
- The Cyclopes: The Giant Telescopes of Herschel and the Leviathan of Lord Rosse
- Stop the Time: Photography and the First All Sky Surveys
- Harmony of Light: Fraunhofer, Kirchhoff, and Huggins
- The Meter and the Measure: Distances of Celestial Bodies, from Aristarchus to Miss Leavitt
- Symphony from the New World: George Hale and the Big Science
- Fundamental Bricks: Two New Sciences, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics
- The Eighth Wonder: The Palomar Giant Telescopes and the New Ideas
- The Sun and the Other Stars: How the Stars Work, How They Live and for How Long
- Pioneers at the Time of the Cold War: The Crisis of Cosmology and the Rustle of the Big Bang
- Observing with Closed Eyes: The Exploration of the Universe at Radio Frequencies
- From Here to Eternity: New Generation Instruments, Amazing Discoveries, and Open Problems
- Acknowledgments
- Index
Readership: This is accessible to a wide audience of curious people, including high school and university students and in general all those who normally keep themselves informed of scientific things.
Key Features:
- Scientific stories told in a captivating way, connected to each other by the thread of the general history in order to give a continuous fresco of the evolution of science in the context of the evolution of the human civilization
