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Summary: A great read, interesting and perceptive
Review: A very nice history of astronomy and cosmology written from the angle of determining the distance scale of the universe. Ferguson starts with an anecdote from her childhood when her father challenged Ferguson and her brother to measure the height of a windmill without touching it. They came upon the solution of using the shadow of the windmill and some basic mathematics. From there, Ferguson launches into the stories of Eratosthenes, Aristarchus and other ancients, right up to modern day debates over the value of Omega, the cosmological constant, and standard candles. This is a very readable and enjoyable account and is not overly technical.
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Summary: How do you measure the Universe?
Review: I have always had a love of astronomy and space exploration, but the distances and measurements used by stargazers always bewildered me. `Measuring the Universe' takes you through, step by step, each astronomical discovery, and the people and methods used, to assist you in better understanding concepts such as `What is a parsec?' or `How do they measure the distance to a star?' (not as accurate as I thought).There are also interesting stories about the private lives of some astronomers such as Eratsthenes of Cyrene (measured the diameter of the Earth), Galileo and Edwin Hubble. A clever mix of textbook and novel, something that any budding or professional astronomer should read.
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Summary: Completely entertaining and informative
Review: I was wowed by this book completely. The narrative of the relationship between the Catholic church and the sciences alone made it worthwhile. If you haven't read a book such as this and think you know what really happened with Galileo Galilei... well, you probably don't.
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Summary: A lucid description of what has been discovered so far.
Review: Kitty Ferguson writes about a deep subject with clarity and enthusiasm. This book describes homo sapiens' attempts to understand the Universe, from the time of Eratosthenes' elegant method of inferring the Earth's diameter in the 3rd century BC; to the end of the second millennium AD, with its Hubble Space Telescope views and the theoretical models of Einstein, Hawking, et al.It is a facinating story that should be required reading.
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Summary: Wow
Review: This book weaves lucid science and history together into a most fascinating tapestry. You will learn about the search for the size of the universe, but you will also learn about the world around you. You will learn how science works, and how people work. You will learn what we know, and how much more we have to learn. This is a beautifully crafted book and well worth the time of scientists, historians, and normal people too!
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Summary: Great physics detective story
Review: This is a great physics detective story, and it blends history and science together to give a picture of how we have measured what was once considered unmeasurable. There are some minor annoyances, such as her repeatedly explaining scientific notation (perhaps a brief appendix could be included in a future edition). Also, she could have explained how the parsec came to be, rather than just using it with no explanation. There are some notes at the end of the book that give the reader suggestions for further reading. To her credit, she includes Halton Arp's concerns about the use of redshift (See Arp's book, Seeing Red). This book builds up a clear picture of how we built up the cosmic distance ladder, and the missteps along the way.
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Summary: Almost a really good book
Review: This is a very readable book, with many ups and downs. It tells the story of key contributors to our understanding of the universe and their quest to measure it in their time and with the tools available to them. It also does a very good job of explaining some basic concepts. It doesn't do such a good job with more complex concepts. And there are some simple concepts that just don't need to be explained repetitively. For instance, the explanations and diagrams explaining parallax are very good. Sometime after that the term parsec appears in the text without any explanation at all. Another example: Cepheid stars are fundamental to current attempts to measure the distant objects, and that is made very clear. But why we can and should depend on Cepheids is not explained. A final example: I don't know how many times she explains that 10 with an exponent menas one followed by that number of zeros, or preceded by that number of zeroes for a negative exponent - but it is way, way more times than necessary and occurs throughout the entire book. A second edition, perhaps with better editing, could easily be much better and be a very good book. Never-the-less, this book is interesting and generally easy to read, and covers a lot of ground about the participants.
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Summary: Almost a really good book
Review: This is a wonderful book and I could not put it down. Query to the author. Not so long ago I asked a physicist friend of mine how it could be that there are galaxies out there 15 billion light years away and the age of the universe is about 15 billion years old? In my mind this does not compute. He allowed as how that was an interesting question and that he would ask somebody at Brookhaven National Laboratories. A few weeks later he sent me the copy of Kitty Furguson's book " Measuring the Universe" with the idea that I would find the answer. However, if the answer was there, I did not find it. Any comment from the author?
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Summary: The size of the universe.
Review: This is a wonderful book and I could not put it down. Query to the author. Not so long ago I asked a physicist friend of mine how it could be that there are galaxies out there 15 billion light years away and the age of the universe is about 15 billion years old? In my mind this does not compute. He allowed as how that was an interesting question and that he would ask somebody at Brookhaven National Laboratories. A few weeks later he sent me the copy of Kitty Furguson's book " Measuring the Universe" with the idea that I would find the answer. However, if the answer was there, I did not find it. Any comment from the author?
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