Parallax
The Race to Measure the Cosmos
-
- $16.99
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
In the dramatic tradition of the best-selling Longitude, Parallax charts the historical path of observational astronomy's most daunting challenge: measuring the distance to a star.
The greatest scientific minds applied themselves in vain to the problem across the millennia, beginning with the ancient Greeks. Not until the nineteenth century would three astronomers, armed with the best telescopes of the age, race to conquer this astronomical Everest—their contest ending in a virtual dead heat.
Against a sweeping backdrop filled with kidnappings, dramatic rescue, swordplay, madness, and bitter rivalry, Alan Hirshfeld brings to life the heroes of this remarkable story. Meet the destitute boy plucked from a collapsed building who becomes the greatest telescope maker the world has ever seen; the hot-tempered Dane whose nose is lopped off in a duel over mathematics; the merchant's apprentice forced to choose between the lure of money and his passion for astronomy; and the musician who astounds the world by discovering a new planet from his own backyard.
Generously illustrated with diagrams, period engravings, and paintings, Parallax is an unforgettable tale that illuminates the distinctly human side of science.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Measuring distances to stars and planets by parallax observation that is, by noting "the apparent shift in an object's position when the object is viewed from different vantage points" was based on a simple, accurate and archaic theory, known since Archimedes; however, putting the theory into successful practice was a 3,000-year exercise in frustration and ruthless competition for astronomers, generations of whom were driven to distraction as seemingly fixed, finite numbers shifted minutely with each technological advance. Archimedes, Galileo and Copernicus slowly completed the first familiar laps of the astronomic race. According to Hirshfeld, director of astronomy at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, the pace quickens by the 1800s, as lesser-known astronomers focus on near stars, and concludes dramatically with two German and one English observer neck and neck as they finish rough proofs on different stars within months of one another. Hirshfeld breathlessly annexes familiar astronomical legends ("Imagine yourself in Aristarchus's sandals"), and his social history, though somewhat thin, engages. For instance, a teenage Wilhelm Struve, forebear of modern astronomy, was kidnapped into Napoleon's army but escaped out a second-story window, freeing himself to pursue parallax. The book comes just as the cosmic map begins to emerge in three dimensions: totally reliable parallax measurements were achieved only recently with satellite observations (in 1989, fewer than 1,000 stars were accurately mapped; now the number is 22,000). Some day, interstellar travelers will remember the stars of Hirshfeld's book Thomas Henderson, Friedrich Bessel and Struve the way geographers honor John Harrison, the man who first determined longitude. Illus. not seen by PW.
