Comets, cosmology and the Big Bang : a history of astronomy from Edmond Halley to Edwin Hubble, 1700-2000 / Allan Chapman.
Pubblicazione:
Oxford : Lion, 2018.
Descrizione fisica:
576 p. : ill., ritr. ; 22 cm
Contiene:
Indice: Acknowledgments. Preface. 1. From the beginning to 1700: the origins of astronomy 2. Cosmology begins at home: captain Edmond Halley, FRS, RN, astronomer, geophysicist and adventurer 3. Could a comet have caused Noah's flood? 4. Let there be more light: how telescope technology became the arbiter in cosmological research 5. The rector and the organist: gravity, star clusters and the origins of the Milky Way 6. William and Caroline Herschel fathom the construction of the heavens from an English country garden 7. Measuring the heavens and the Earth in eighteenth-century Europe: I. In pursuit of Venus: astronomy's first great international adventure 8. Measuring the heavens and the Earth in eighteenth-century Europe: II. Pendulums, planets and gravity: creating the science of geodesy 9. Cosmology and the Romantic Age 10. Sir John Herschel: the universal philosopher of the age 11. There must be somebody out there! 12. Mary Somerville: mathematician, astronomer and gifted science communicator 13. Sir George Biddell Airy of Greenwich: Astronomer Royal to the British Empire 14. Barristers, brewers, peer and engineers: paying for astronomical research: the British Grand Amateur tradition 15. The camera does not lie: the birth of astronomical photography 16. Unweaving the rainbow: I. Sunlight, sunspot cycles and magnetic storms 17. Unweaving the rainbow: II. Cosmologists and Catholic priest pioneers of astrophysics 18. The Revd Thomas William Webb and the birth of popular astronomy 19. Ladies of the night: the astronomical women in Great Britain and America 20. Astronomy for the masses in the Victorian Age and early twentieth century 21. Under New World skies: the great American observatories 22. On the eve of the watershed: astronomy and cosmology (c. 1890-1920) 23. It's all relative: the Alice in Wonderland world of early twentieth-century physics 24. Crossing the watershed: Edwin Hubble, the celebrity astronomer of the galaxies 25. The Belgian priest-cosmologist and the cosmic egg 26. Sir Bernard Lovell and the radio universe 27. Fly me to the moon: the birth of the space age 28. A universe for the people: Sir Patrick Moore and the new amateur astronomy 29. Postscript: Creation revisited: where do we stand today? Appendix: The clock lane ghost, or The gost catch. Notes. List of in-text illustrations. Further reading. Index
