Extensive references, a glossary, bibliography, and a timeline of noteworthy events make the book a useful volume for the more-than-casual reader, who will also appreciate the concluding chapter. The later chapters review the status of grand unified theories and the attempts to push back the hands of the big bang clock yet another zillionth of a second. Did you know that Tycho Brahe died of a burst bladder following a beer-drinking bout at a royal dinner party? Or that Galileo refused to send Kepler a telescope? Ferris tells all in a style geared to general readers and quite prepared to see the humor of a situation: He describes Herschel wandering through the Seven Years War ""in a state of abstraction worthy of Buster Keaton in The General."" Of Lemaitre, whose 1927 paper linked the red shifts of galaxies to the expanding universe of general relativity, Ferris writes, ""Plumply bourgeois in appearance, a homeboy in a priest's collar, Lemaitre was brushed off by the luminaries."" Ferris has clearly plumbed the biographical literature and the cultural as well as the scientific scene, occasionally taking time out to devote a chapter to technology, from astrolabe to chronometer to today's assortment of super accelerators. Here again, Ferris focuses on individuals who were the movers and shapers, mincing no words about their personal foibles and idiosyncracies.
Berkeley professor who has spent 12 years in preparing this excellent volume, a fitting successor to his fine The Red Limit (1977). Second, as a personal rite of passage of a U.C. The title can be taken in two ways-first, as the long view of a historian of science who surveys how the human perspective of the size and age of the universe has expanded over time. The book was published in multiple languages including English, consists of pages and is. The first edition of the novel was published in July, and was written by Timothy Ferris.
Ferris explains both the science itself and the personalities that made monumental contributions to our understanding of the cosmos. Coming of Age in the Milky Way is an enjoyable history of cosmology and related fields.
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