Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos

by Alan W. Hirshfeld

Book Overview

How can we measure the distance to a star? Beginning in ancient Greece, history's greatest scientific minds applied themselves to the problem in vain. Not until the nineteenth century would three men,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0716737116
• ISBN13: 9780716737117
• Release Date: May 2001
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
• Length: 313 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.8" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Fully Entertaining

I hated to see this book come to it's conclusion. Dr. Hirshfeld did some great detective work and used just enough humor to keep me interested from cover to cover. The writing is easily understood by a layperson such as myself, yet I felt that I was guided along in the quest for the proof of where the Earth is positioned in the universe.

A delightful read, astronomy history buffs will love it...

Along the lines of Longitude, where Dava Sobel took us on a walk through astronomical history with the focus on the effort to determine longitude at sea, Hirshfeld's "Parallax" is an engaging historical survey concentrating on efforts to detect that minute wobble of stars. Hirshfeld focuses on the personalities and people - which makes this story enjoyable and even riveting.Copernicus' view of the heavens had long since prevailed - no serious person of science doubted that the Earth and planets orbited the sun. However, there was no concrete scientific evidence to prove the Copernican view. The acid test of the Earth's motion, slight displacement of stars in June and December, when the Earth is on opposite sides of its orbit, had still not been detected. Hirshfeld traces the story from the earliest Greeks through Hooke, Newton, Bessel, Bradley and many others. It's a great story, well told.

An Excellent Book by a Master Teacher

Hirschfeld makes the science of astronomy come alive. Unlike books written by science journalists, this one is by a real astronomer who knows his material and explains it very, very well. I had little interest in astronomy until I read Parallax, but now I'm ready to go out and look at the heavens!

Race to Measure the Cosmos, a great adventure & a great read

I highly recommend and thoroughly enjoyed this delightful spellbinding journey through the history and science of astronomy and its quest to find stellar parallax. Parallax is full of humor, suspense and intrigue with insight into the creativity, genius, skill, perseverance and sometimes quirkiness of astronomy's founding fathers. I was fascinated by the human story, often all too human but more often inspirational, of each contributor in this scientific endeavor from the early Greeks through the Renaissance to 19th century Europe. Hirshfeld gives the reader an intimate sense of each of these great astronomers(Aristarchus, Copernicus, Gallileo, Kepler, Newton, Hooke, Bradley and many more) and what each contributed and made them tick.Hirshfeld tells an impressive tale of the scientific mind and engineering skills, and their challenges, pursuits and perseverance against all obstacles, technical and political, to discover the scientific truths that the earth revolves around the sun and distances to the stars. The tale is wrought with pitfalls due to the enormity of the scale of the universe, the diversity of stars, the technological difficulty in inventing and improving the telescope and its usability, reliability and resolution in its early incarnations, and many preconceived misleading notions and an enormity of other stumbling blocks.Reading Parallax, I imagined the frustration for over 2000 years knowing the basic principle of stellar parallax - measure the shift in position of a star relative to its background stars from opposite sides of the earth's orbit and geometry yields its distance - and not having the technology to measure it, for even the closest stars are very far away and therefore have very small parallaxes to resolve. Parallax gave me a sense of admiration for those early astronomers and their inspiration, insight, foresight and dogged determination, often in dire circumstances.Alan Hirshfeld has a knack for helping the reader to visualize his descriptions of technical, physics and telescopic concepts and equipment. There are also great diagrams illustrating technical concepts and mechanical equipment that enhanced my reading experience, along with engaging tales of how telescopic equipment was invented, constructed and used over the centuries in pursuit of stellar parallax. Hirshfeld is especially charming when he relates his personal delightful stories from aspiring young amateur astronomer to professional astronomer and physics teacher. Parallax is a compelling, informative, insightful and often humorous tale of the people, science and technology that race to find the parallax of a star. Parallax is a great scientific who-done-it, building on each scientist, their obstacles and innovations, giving the reader the anticipation of what scientist with what equipment will solve the technological challenge of measuring stellar parallax. I learned a lot of fun and interesting things about the people involved, the evolution of

Stretching the imagination

This is a book that stretches your imagination. Just think of it, a method for determining the distance to the nearest stars by measuring the shift in position when viewed from one end of Earth's orbit and again from the other end! At least that is the basic idea. But, as Alan Hirshfeld points out, it took over 2000 years of attempts before it could be done. Hirshfeld takes the reader through the controversy among the ancient Greeks of whether the earth or the sun was the center of the universe. The reason they did not follow Aristarchus, who proposed the sun as the center, and went with Ptolmey, who put the earth at the center, was that they could not detect parallax to any star. Hirshfeld discusses the complicated model Ptolmey had to create, and takes the reader through the immense mathematical efforts of Coprenicus and, again, the failure to detect parallax. He moves on to the disputes of the 16th and 17th centuries, the gradual realization that Aristotle was wrong when he said that God would not leave empty space between the heavenly spheres, but, in fact, that there were such great distances between the Earth and the nearest stars that the slight shift from parallax was smaller than any instrument was able to measure.The books brings us the wonderful characters who were involved in this search for parallax from the slip shod but enthusiastic work of Robert Hooke to the precise careful observations of James Bradley to the final triumph in measuring parallax that occured in the last 19th century. It is an exciting story, told with vigor and filled with wonderful sketches of amazing men. Even more amazing is the slow discovery of more and more about the universe. Hershfeld points out, for instance, that Galileo actually saw the planet Neptune when he was viewing the moons of Jupiter with his telescope but took it to be a distant star.This book is filled with the wonderful romance of astronomy, peering out and letting the human mind travel millions and millions of miles into space.