Customer Reviews

Archives of the Universe: A Treasury of Astronomy's Historic Works of Discovery

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Archives of the Universe is a phenomenal book which tells the history of astronomical discovery. The book starts at the very dawn of astronomy and explains how the very first calendars were invented. It runs through medieval times explaining the discoveries of Galileo, Copernicus and many others, and concludes with the latest discoveries in cosmology, including the accelerating expansion of the universe and the discovery of extra-solar planets. This book covers it all, and more importantly, it covers discoveries in chronological order in many cases clearly showing how one discovery leads to the next.

One of things which I found most appealing about this book is the fact that it is broken into relatively short chapters. Each chapter begins with a short explanation by the author, followed by an excerpt from the original research paper in which the discovery was first announced. How great is it to read about Galileo's discoveries in Galileo's own (translated) words?

A word of caution: this is a 700 page book, and some of the research paper excerpts included in it are very technical (especially some of the most modern ones). These are very hard, if not impossible, to understand. In many of the chapters I wished that the author's explanations were longer and more detailed, while the research paper excerpts were shorter.

Bottom line, if you are an amateur astronomer, like me, you will LOVE this book. However this book is heavier than most popular science books and I would probably not recommend it for the casual reader of popular science.

Back during my undergraduate days, one of the most interesting courses that I took was the history of astronomy, and I wish this book had been available. While that course was very good at introducing the different ways in which the universe was perceived and conceived through the different cultures and periods of history, we were often reading second-hand or third-hand accounts. So much of education these days seems to consist of second-hand and third-hand analyses and retellings, working on the assumption that the original texts are too difficult, too arcane, or too 'something' to be useful and understood. Sometimes this might be true; however, making allowances for translation from different languages, I still believe, as obviously the author of this text does, that there is much to be gained by reading the actual words of scientists and philosophers themselves as they first formulated and wrote down their ideas.

This is a text of excerpts from primary documents that have had significant influence in the direction of astronomy and astrophysics in particular, and science and philosophy more generally. These are grouped into eight broad categories: The Ancient Sky, Revolutions, Taking Measure, Touching the Heavens, Einsteinian Cosmos, The Milky Way and Beyond, New Eyes, New Universe, and Accelerating Outward. These each include a half-dozen to a dozen different documents.

Bartusiak introduces each document with a brief essay that sets context both in general history as well as the progress of science, and discusses the importance and influence of the documents for later developments. The groupings are not set in stone, but can be useful: 'The essays introducing each moment of discovery were written to stand alone, inviting the reader to peruse his or her interests in no particular order. Yet it can be profitable to read the sections in sequence to perceive how the questions that observers asked of the heavens evolved over time.'

Some of the readings are heavy going. 'Many of the papers, particularly those from the modern era, are hardly narrative literature. The mathematics can often be unwieldy and the issues fairly complex.' Despite this, astronomy remains one of the more popular and captivating of the sciences, and Bartusiak has made a concession to the more general reader by simplifying some of the papers, omitting detail that might be of interest to professionals, but serve to cloud the view for the more general reader.

This is a great volume for those who are interested in astronomy, the history of science, or cosmological development more generally - particularly the early part, when philosophy and science were not so separate as they are today, general readers may find a great deal of insight and interest.