{"product_id":"archives-of-the-universe-isbn-9780375713682","title":"Archives of the Universe","description":"An unparalleled history of astronomy presented in the words of the scientists who made the discoveries. Here are the writings of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Halley, Hubble, and Einstein, as well as that of dozens of others who have significantly contributed to our picture of the universe. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom Aristotle's proof that the Earth is round to the 1998 paper that posited an accelerating universe, this book contains 100 entries spanning the history of astronomy. Award-winning science writer Marcia Bartusiak provides enormously entertaining introductions, putting the material in context and explaining its place in the literature. \u003ci\u003eArchives of the Universe\u003c\/i\u003e is essential reading for professional astronomers, science history buffs, and backyard stargazers alike.\u003ci\u003ePreface \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eI. The Ancient Sky\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1 Mayan Venus Tables\u003cbr\u003e2 Proof That the Earth Is a Sphere\u003cbr\u003e3 Celestial Surveying\u003cbr\u003e4 Measuring the Earth’s Circumference\u003cbr\u003e5 Precession of the Equinoxes\u003cbr\u003e6 Ptolemy’s \u003ci\u003eAlmagest\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eII. Revolutions\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e7 Copernicus and the Sun-Centered Universe\u003cbr\u003e8 Tycho Brahe and the Changing Heavens\u003cbr\u003e9 Johannes Kepler and Planetary Motion\u003cbr\u003e10 Galileo Initiates the Telescopic Era\u003cbr\u003e11 Newton’s Universal Law of Gravity\u003cbr\u003e12 Halley’s Comet\u003cbr\u003e13 Binary Stars\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eIII. Taking Measure\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e14 The Speed of Light\u003cbr\u003e15 The Solar System’s Origin\u003cbr\u003e16 Discovery of Uranus\u003cbr\u003e17 Stars Moving and Changing\u003cbr\u003e18 The First Asteroid\u003cbr\u003e19 Distance to a Star\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e20 Discovery of Neptune\u003cbr\u003e21 The Shape of the Milky Way\u003cbr\u003e22 Spiraling Nebulae\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eIV. Touching the Heavens\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e23 Spectral Lines\u003cbr\u003e24 Deciphering the Solar Spectrum\u003cbr\u003e25 Gaseous Nebulae\u003cbr\u003e26 Doppler Shifts and Spectroscopic Binaries\u003cbr\u003e27 Classification of the Stars\u003cbr\u003e28 Giant Stars and Dwarf Stars\u003cbr\u003e29 Hydrogen: The Prime Element\u003cbr\u003e30 Stellar Mass, Luminosity, and Stability\u003cbr\u003e31 Sunspot Cycle, Sun\/Earth Connection, and Helium\u003cbr\u003e32 Origin of Meteors and Shooting Stars\u003cbr\u003e33 Cosmic Rays\u003cbr\u003e34 Discovery of Pluto\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eV. Einsteinian Cosmos\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e35 Special Relativity and E = mc2\u003cbr\u003e36 General Relativity and the Solar Eclipse Test\u003cbr\u003e37 Relativistic Models of the Universe\u003cbr\u003e38 Big Bang Versus Steady State\u003cbr\u003e39 White Dwarf Stars\u003cbr\u003e40 Beyond the White Dwarf\u003cbr\u003e41 Supernovae and Neutron Stars\u003cbr\u003e42 Black Holes\u003cbr\u003e43 Source of Stellar Power\u003cbr\u003e44 Creating Elements in the Big Bang\u003cbr\u003e45 Cosmic Microwave Background Predicted\u003cbr\u003e46 Creating Elements in the Stars\u003cbr\u003e47 A Star’s Life Cycle\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eVI. The Milky Way and Beyond\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e48 Cepheids: The Cosmic Standard Candles\u003cbr\u003e49 Sun’s Place in the Milky Way\u003cbr\u003e50 Dark Nebulae and Interstellar Matter\u003cbr\u003e51 Discovery of Other Galaxies\u003cbr\u003e52 Expansion of the Universe\u003cbr\u003e53 Stellar Populations and Resizing the Universe\u003cbr\u003e54 Mapping the Milky Way’s Spiral Arms\u003cbr\u003e55 Source and Composition of Comets\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eVII. New Eyes, New Universe\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e56 Radio Astronomy\u003cbr\u003e57 Interstellar Hydrogen\u003cbr\u003e58 Molecules in Space\u003cbr\u003e59 Van Allen Radiation Belts\u003cbr\u003e60 Geology of Mars\u003cbr\u003e61 Extrasolar X-Ray Sources\u003cbr\u003e62 Quasars\u003cbr\u003e63 Evidence for the Big Bang\u003cbr\u003e64 Pulsars\u003cbr\u003e65 The Infrared Sky and the Galactic Center\u003cbr\u003e66 Neutrino Astronomy\u003cbr\u003e67 Gamma-Ray Bursts\u003cbr\u003e68 Binary Pulsar and Gravity Waves\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eVIII. Accelerating Outward\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e69 Dark Matter\u003cbr\u003e70 Gravitational Lensing\u003cbr\u003e71 Inflation\u003cbr\u003e72 The Bubbly Universe\u003cbr\u003e73 Galaxy Evolution and the Hubble Deep Field\u003cbr\u003e74 Extrasolar Planets\u003cbr\u003e75 The Accelerating Universe\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eNotes\u003cbr\u003eBibliography\u003cbr\u003eAcknowledgments\u003cbr\u003eIndex\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Extraordinary. . . .  A rich archaeological dig. . . . Bartusiak . . .introduces these astronomers with deftly written, insightful commentary. . . . [A] wonderful book.\" \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eSky \u0026amp; Telescope\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[Bartusiak] provides a helpful road map with her lucid explanatory essays and annotation.\" \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Bartusiak has done astronomy a great favor.\" \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eNew Scientist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The reader gets not only a clear and concise history of astronomy . . . in Bartusiak's fine introductions . . . but also excerpts from many of the memorable papers written by the scientists who made the pivotal astronomical discoveries.\" —\u003ci\u003eScientific American\u003c\/i\u003eMarcia Bartusiak is the author of \u003ci\u003eThursday’s Universe\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThrough a Universe Darkly\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eEinstein’s Unfinished Symphony\u003c\/i\u003e. Her work has appeared in many magazines, including \u003ci\u003eAstronomy\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eNational Geographic\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eDiscover\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eScience\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eSmithsonian\u003c\/i\u003e. A two-time winner of the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award, she teaches in the graduate program in science writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lives in Sudbury, Massachusetts, with her husband.The Ancient Sky\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe fortuitous alliance of two agents led to the birth of astronomy:  curiosity and necessity. From savannas, mountaintops, and forest  clearings, the first celestial observers looked up at the nighttime sky  and beheld a vast, pitch-black bowl covered with sparkling pinpoints of  light. While likely awed at first by this jewel-like canopy, imagining  it as a vaulted roof through which the fires of the gods flickered,  prehistoric peoples eventually learned there were practical benefits to  studying the sky’s incessant motions and cycles.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTracing out patterns of stars—constellations—became a useful procedure  for establishing a coordinate system across the heavens, and the  leisurely parade of these stellar figures over the seasons served as  valuable markers for navigation, agriculture, and timekeeping. As the  Greek poet Hesiod advised in the eighth century b.c., “When the  Pleiades, daughters of Atlas, are rising, begin the harvest, the  plowing when they set.” Here the farmer was instructed to reap winter  wheat in the spring, when the Pleiades rise with the Sun, and to plant  seeds in the fall, when the notable constellation sets in the west  before sunrise. In ancient Egypt observers noticed that the brilliant  star Sirius rose in the east right before dawn, at the very time that  the Nile river experienced its annual flooding.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the high northern latitudes it was the Sun’s recurrent passage that  held particular significance. As winter approaches there, the Sun’s  path moves steadily southward, just as the days and nights get colder.  Primitive megaliths were built to mark the pivotal moment—winter  solstice—when the Sun would (to much thanksgiving) turn back and once  again rise higher in the sky.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRelics from the first days of civilization showcase the ancients’  intense intellectual curiosity about the nighttime sky. Inscriptions on  Chinese oracle bones recorded the appearance of bright comets and  “guest stars”; Mayan hieroglyphic books documented the movements of  Venus with remarkable precision; clay tablets in Babylonia, dating back  nearly four thousand years, chronicled the cyclic movements of the Moon  and the “wanderers”—the planets—among the fixed stars. With Alexander  the Great conquering Persia in 331 B.C., Babylonia’s tradition of keen  skywatching merged with Greece’s focus on geometric models of the  universe’s workings.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was the ancient Greeks who were most influential in moving  contemplation of the cosmos from pure mythology to a more reasoned  cosmology. They began to wonder about the essential nature of heavenly  bodies: how they moved, what they were made of. The first challenge was  explaining why that small, elite group of wanderers—the Sun, Moon,  Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—moved at differing speeds and  in some cases even stopped and moved backwards in the sky. The  Pythagoreans, so enamored of numbers and harmonic relationships,  influenced Greek astronomers to solve this problem by thinking of the  heavens as a geometric system. With beauty and harmony requiring  uniform motion, imaginative models were devised to have the planets  move via a set of nested spheres. It was the first attempt at a grand  unified theory: explaining celestial motion with a single,  all-encompassing mechanism. At the same time, these early astronomers  came to understand the source of the Moon’s light, the cause of  eclipses, and the true shape of the Earth. They also used their  knowledge of geometry to tackle such other questions as the size of our planet and the distances to the Sun and Moon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere were some prescient speculations on the nature of the solar  system in this ancient era. In the fourth century b.c. Heraclides of  Pontus suggested that night and day were due to the rotation of the  Earth. Aristarchus of Samos later put the Sun at the center of his  model of the universe. But these ideas never flourished, as they were  overshadowed by the authoritative cosmology espoused by the noted  philosopher Aristotle. At the center of his cosmos was the Earth,  composed of one of the four basic elements. Surrounding this were water  and air. The last element, fire, extended outward to the Moon. In this  realm, life was mortal and imperfect. The heavenly bodies, on the other  hand, inhabited a domain that was flawless and eternal—the celestial  spheres in perpetual circular motion. This model held sway for nearly  twenty centuries, and astronomy progressed only when observers such as  Hipparchus and Ptolemy dared to tinker with its precepts. Hipparchus  discovered the precession of the equinoxes, and Ptolemy cleverly  amended Aristotle’s standard model to make it agree better with  observation. From these early creative attempts to understand the  star-studded sky, a science was born.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1  \/  Mayan Venus Tables\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSome 3,500 years ago the Maya came to occupy a large territory in  Central America that now covers southern Mexico, Guatemala, and  northern Belize. By A.D. 200 (or even earlier) these native  Mesoamericans had advanced from a simple Stone Age existence  cultivating maize and squash to a sophisticated civilization whose  cities contained impressive stone temples, palaces, and pyramids.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlong with hieroglyphic writing, the Maya developed refined  astronomical methods that were representative of astronomical  techniques carried out by early societies in other parts of the  world—for example, in ancient Egypt and Babylonia. Like the  observations made by those other ancient cultures, Mayan stargazing  focused on cycles. They viewed the cosmos as a repetitive machine whose  operation could offer their society advance knowledge of its fate if  the celestial movements could be accurately tracked. Their meticulous  observations of the nighttime sky were closely linked with their  ritualistic needs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOf particular importance to the Maya was the planet Venus, whose  appearance in the sky follows a distinct pattern. When Venus passes  between the Earth and the Sun (a configuration known as inferior  conjunction), it cannot be seen for eight days. Eventually Venus is  spotted in the morning sky, after it proceeds in its orbit and rises  just before the Sun. For 263 days on average it remains visible in the  morning, until it passes behind the Sun (superior conjunction) and  again disappears. Fifty days later it comes back into view but this  time as the evening star, remaining in the night sky for another 263  days until it reaches inferior conjunction once again. The period from  one inferior conjunction to the next totals 584 days.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Maya followed this cycle and recorded their knowledge of its  predictability in the Dresden Codex, one of three surviving Mayan  hieroglyphic books transported to Europe as spoils of the Spanish  conquest. In each book, intricate glyphs are displayed on a single  sheet of paper, pounded from the inner bark of a wild ficus tree and  folded into separate leaves like a screen. The Dresden Codex, nearly  four yards long, has thirty-nine leaves (painted on both sides) and  takes its name from the German city in which it now resides. It’s  essentially a series of almanacs that chronicle upcoming astronomical  events, including lunar and solar eclipses. The glyphs depict a number  of gods—some benevolent, others auguring bad tidings. They include the  rain gods, the god of maize, a merchant god, a sun god, and a moon  goddess, as well as several deities associated with death. Astronomy in  this case was being used for divine forecasting, to help farmers  predict times of drought, fearsome storms, or an abundant crop.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Venus tables are found on six pages of the Dresden Codex and tell  the reader when Venus will appear and disappear in the morning and  evening sky over time. One of the Maya’s greatest achievements in their  tracking of Venus was recognizing that the planet’s cycle was not a  full 584 days but slightly less (583.92 days). They adjusted their  calendar for this difference with astounding accuracy. Concern for such  precision is essentially what transformed an astrological endeavor into  a science.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Maya had names for units of time comparable to days, months,  decades, and centuries, although on a far different counting system.  The uinal (or winal), for example, consisted of 20 days, a sort of  month. At times 5 extra days were added. A tun, close to a year, was  360 days. Twenty tuns made up a katun, while 20 katuns was a baktun. A  listing of the number of these “centuries,” “decades,” “years,”  “months,” and days since some day zero was one way that the Maya  generated a calendar. The Mayan Venus tables, though, use another  system, where each day is represented by a set of numbers (a dot is  one; a bar is five) and names. These dates are listed on the upper left  of a page. Notice in Figure 1.1 that every line in this section has  four symbol groups. Each specifies an important date in one complete  cycle of the Venus period: first the day when Venus will disappear at  superior conjunction; next when it reappears as the evening star; then  when it disappears at inferior conjunction; and finally when it becomes  visible once again as the morning star. Continuing along a selected  line across five of the tables (see Figures 1.2 and 1.3) covers a  unique period of 2,920 days, over which five Venus cycles equal eight  Earth years. At the end, the user of the table moves on to the next  line of the five-table chart, where the cycle begins again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e2  \/  Proof That the Earth Is a Sphere\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 342 B.C. King Philip II of Macedonia brought the learned philosopher Aristotle to his court to tutor his son, who as a man would become Alexander the Great. Soon after Alexander assumed the throne, Aristotle  established a school in Athens where he continued his wide-ranging  studies in philosophy, logic, politics, physics, and biology.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAristotle’s writings on astronomy were compiled in a four-volume text  entitled De caelo, “On the Heavens.” The cosmology that he established  within this work wielded a powerful influence on astronomers for nearly  twenty centuries. Aristotle reasoned that the Earth was an arena of  change and imperfection. Its basic elements, earth and water, moved  downward, because they sought their natural place. The other essential  elements, air and fire, moved upward. To Aristotle, though, the region inhabited by the planets and stars was far different. That was because  celestial bodies did not move up or down but rather traveled in  circles, an eternal path of perfection and uniformity. Given that  difference, he concluded that the heavens had to be composed of another  substance altogether, the aether.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere were irregularities in the heavenly movements that required  clarification. To explain retrograde, the appearance of a planet’s  traveling backward on the nighttime sky, Aristotle adopted a model of  planetary motion devised by his contemporary Eudoxus of Cnidus.*  Eudoxus, a geometer, introduced the idea of the planets and stars being  moved by heavenly spheres rotating about the Earth. Each planet was  attached to several spheres. The orderly motion of these spheres, once  combined, produced a planet’s deceivingly irregular movement. Aristotle  modified this system and advocated it so commandingly that it was  difficult for celestial observers even to consider models that didn’t  incorporate his vision of circular perfection. During the rise of  Christianity, it was transformed into God’s chosen design. Modern  astronomy would not emerge until astronomers were willing to break away  from such Aristotelian notions and consider other possibilities to  explain their observations (see Part II, “Revolutions”).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDe caelo is more philosophy than true astronomy, but there is one  section in which Aristotle does rally decent evidence in behalf of his  conclusion: the sphericity of the Earth. That the Earth is round was  likely recognized by Greek thinkers, such as the Pythagoreans, two  centuries beforehand. For that matter, ancient seafarers saw far-off  landmarks or ships dipping below sea level and probably realized that  the Earth was curved. The earliest surviving proof, however, can be  traced to Aristotle. The major part of his argument comes from his  physics: a spherical shape, he theorizes, is naturally generated as the  terrestrial elements fall downward to seek the center. But he doesn’t  ignore observational data (including, as we shall see, the range of  elephants). Absorbing the wisdom of others before him, he notes that  the Earth’s shadow, as it passes over the Moon during an eclipse, is  always circular. He adds to this by noting that travelers will see  different stars come into view as they travel north and south, a change  that would not occur if the Earth were flat. Such reasoning was a  tremendous advance over earlier guesses on the Earth’s shape, such as  Anaximander’s suggestion in the sixth century b.c. that it was a  cylinder freely suspended in space. As described by Hippolytus in his  Refutation of All Heresies, “Its form is rounded, circular, like a  stone pillar; of its plane surfaces one is that on which we stand, the  other is opposite.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAristotle’s astronomical commentary also includes the earliest recorded  mention of the Earth’s circumference, 400,000 stades, although he  doesn’t provide his source or the method of the calculation. Originally  a stade was the length of a traditional Greek racetrack, but eventually  different types of stades came into use. Values can vary from roughly 8  to 10 stades per mile. So Aristotle’s declared circumference is between  40,000 to 50,000 miles, not outrageously larger than the true  measurement of nearly 25,000.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eFrom De caelo\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eby Aristotle\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTranslated by J. L. Stocks\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe shape of the heaven is of necessity spherical; for that is the  shape most appropriate to its substance and also by nature primary.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFirst, let us consider generally which shape is primary among planes  and solids alike. Every plane figure must be either rectilinear or  curvilinear. Now the rectilinear is bounded by more than one line, the  curvilinear by one only. But since in any kind the one is naturally  prior to the many and the simple to the complex, the circle will be the  first of plane figures. Again, if by complete, as previously defined,  we mean a thing outside which no part of itself can be found, and if  addition is always possible to the straight line but never to the  circular, clearly the line which embraces the circle is complete. If  then the complete is prior to the incomplete, it follows on this ground  also that the circle is primary among figures. And the sphere holds the  same position among solids. For it alone is embraced by a single  surface, while rectilinear solids have several. The sphere is among  solids what the circle is among plane figures. Further, those who  divide bodies into planes and generate them out of planes seem to bear  witness to the truth of this. Alone among solids they leave the sphere  undivided, as not possessing more than one surface: for the division  into surfaces is not just dividing a whole by cutting it into its  parts, but division of another fashion into parts different in form. It  is clear, then, that the sphere is first of solid figures. . . .","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303754584293,"sku":"NP9780375713682","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375713682.jpg?v=1767721745","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/archives-of-the-universe-isbn-9780375713682","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}