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| Astronomy Through the Ages. The Story of the Human Attempt to Understand the Universe | Buy a book...
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| Author(s): | Robert Wilson |
| Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
| ISBN: | 0 7484 0748 0 |
| Format: | hardback |
| 305pp | |
| Price: | £19.95 |
| Review Date: | 23 May 2000 |
| Review: | The book starts with the first serious observations by the Babylonians in 5000 BC, then the Egyptians, followed by the great intellectual revolution of the Ancient Greeks in the first millennium BC, which defined the basis of Astronomy (and science in general) for 2000 years. The second great intellectual explosion had to wait until the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, when the basis for modern science and Astronomy was established. The invention of the telescope in that era initiated a new age in Astronomy, which saw the limit of the observable Universe pushed back and back until its remarkable extent was finally established in the early twentieth century. The developments in radio and space Astronomy after the Second World War then revealed a more violent Universe, with new and exciting objects, and established information on which the first reasonable theories could be developed on the origin, nature and evolution of the Universe. |