Coming of Age in the Milky Way [Paperback]

Timothy Ferris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1989 | ISBN-10: 0385263260 | ISBN-13: 978-0385263269

Winner of the 1988 American Institute of Physics Prize and named one of 1988's best books by the New York Times Book Review, this brilliant, lively and informative book seeks to comprehend the enormities of cosmic space and time and how this quest has shaped religion, politics and philosophy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The ancient Egyptians regarded the sky as a kind of tent canopy. Thirty centuries later, astronomer William Herschel argued that the sun belongs to a huge cluster of stars (a galaxy, as we call it today) and charted great swaths of intergalactic space through a telescope. How the human species slowly awakened to the vast reaches of space and time is the story absorbingly told by popular science writer Ferris (The Red Limit, Galaxies). His narrative humanizes the scientific enterpriseGalileo emerges here as a careerist, and Johannes Kepler as a self-loathing neurotic. Although it covers well-trod ground, this remarkable synthesis makes broad areas of science accessible to the layperson, from Darwin's and Lyell's investigations of the age of the earth to modern physicists' quest for a perfectly symmetrical, hyperdimensional universe. BOMC alternate.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal

YA In the first section, Ferris uses historical anecdotes to relate astronomical discoveries and the foibles of their discoverers in a successful attempt to show the ``big names'' of science as real persons, warts and all. The second section, on the history of space and time, is also well done, if lacking in the human details. The third section, which deals with cosmology and modern physics, uses a philosophical approach to discuss difficult material; the result is not easy to absorb, but it is good base material for students who will ask questions and go further on their own. Throughout the book, introductory quotations are used to advantage to tease readers into the next topic. Bob Fliess, Episcopal High School, Bellaire, Tex .
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (June 1, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385263260
• ISBN-13: 978-0385263269
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,177,119 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Timothy Ferris is the author of twelve books - among them The Science of Liberty and the bestsellers The Whole Shebang and Coming of Age in the Milky Way, which have been translated into fifteen languages and were named by The New York Times as two of the leading books published in the twentieth century, and Seeing in the Dark, named one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2002. He also edited the anthologies Best American Science Writing 2001 and the World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics. A former editor of Rolling Stone magazine, he has published over 200 articles and essays in The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Forbes, Harper's, Scientific American, Vanity Fair, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and other periodicals.

Ferris wrote and narrated three television specials - "The Creation of the Universe," which aired repeatedly in network prime time for nearly 20 years, "Life Beyond Earth" (1999), and "Seeing in the Dark" (2007). He produced the Voyager phonograph record, an artifact of human civilization containing music and sounds of Earth launched aboard the twin Voyager interstellar spacecraft, which are now exiting the outer reaches of the solar system. He was among the journalists selected as candidates to fly aboard the Space Shuttle in 1986, and has served on various NASA commissions studying the long-term goals of space exploration and the potential hazards posed by near-Earth asteroids.

Called "the best popular science writer in the English language" by The Christian Science Monitor and "the best science writer of his generation" by The Washington Post, Ferris has received the American Institute of Physics prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His works have been nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Professor Ferris has taught in five disciplines - astronomy, English, history, journalism, and philosophy - at four universities, and is now emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars forget Hawking, July 9, 2001

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Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Coming of Age in the Milky Way (Paperback)

When Timothy Ferris decided to write a history of Cosmology he very nearly ended up with a book the size of the Cosmos itself. But for the final product, the result of twelve years of work, he pared three volumes of material down to a more manageable 500 pages. In so doing he has given us what must surely be one of the best books of popular science ever written.

Science writing, if it is to appeal to us unwashed masses, must achieve two very difficult things : it must render difficult concepts comprehensible to the laymen and it must be exciting enough to hold the reader's interest. Coming of Age... succeeds brilliantly on both grounds. Mr. Ferris tells his story as if it were an adventure tale, the adventure being man's continuing quest to understand the world around him, which has pushed the age of the Earth and the physical boundaries of the Universe back further and further, at the same time that the basic matter that makes up the Universe has been perceived to be smaller and smaller than we first believed. And yet, even as we've come to realize how much more complex things are than we first realized, we've nonetheless made extraordinary progress in understanding them.

Meanwhile, Ferris goes beyond the mere theories and gives us a rich set of portraits of the often odd men who made the discoveries : Tycho Brahe with his lead nose; Newton practicing alchemy; Einstein with his various foibles; etc. Though there must surely be some temptation to demonstrate how remarkable these men's' discoveries were by presenting them in all their complexity, Ferris mercifully presents their ideas in terms that we can usually grasp. If things get a little dicey towards the end of the book, and the theories become increasingly obscure and difficult to understand, perhaps it is because they are so new that they have not been thoroughly tested yet. Perhaps their ugliness is an indicator that they are simply untrue. So many of the great physicists have intuitively believed that when it is finally given to us to understand everything about the universe, the answers will be so simple that we will wonder how we could have missed them for so long.

At any rate, this is a terrific book, filled with the thrill of discovery and the often amusing stories of the discoverers. If you are one of the millions who gave up on Stephen Hawking's book, but want to know what was in it, try this much easier read. It's got all the same info, but it's actually geared towards those of us who may not already know it all.

GRADE : A

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Could become one of the classics, April 28, 2005

By 

Inchoatus.com "Inchoatus.com" (Greeley, CO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Coming of Age in the Milky Way (Paperback)

Timothy Ferris is a well-known and unusually gifted non-fiction writer dealing in astronomy. This book, The Coming of Age in the Milky Way, is the book that earned him his famous name.

The problem with so many non-fiction books dealing in the so-called "hard sciences" is that the fields change so rapidly that the works very quickly become obsolete. One need look no further than Cosmos by Carl Sagan and even A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking to realize how quickly cutting edge theory becomes yesterday's news. This book is different. Coming of Age is a classic that will withstand the obsolescence of many other books because, rather than promulgating unified theories and multi-universe dimensions, it instead takes an historical approach. It is quite literally the human race coming of age in the field of astronomy beginning with the ancient peoples and the first notions of a round earth, through the classic Greek and Arabian astronomers, through the dark ages to Galileo, Copernicus, and Newton; following through with Einstein and finally the quantum-state theories we have today.

Rather than a boring litany of discoveries that one might find in an encyclopedia, Ferris makes his book a rousing discussion of scientists flailing at the unknown and chronicling in detail all the misunderstandings and missteps taken in the drunken, ambling path of cosmic discovery. It's that fallibility in understanding matched with the insatiable curiosity of the human race that makes the work so enlivening and so breathtaking. It becomes impossible not to become entranced with this brotherhood spanning so many ages seeking no more than a deeper understanding of the stars. For many, it will become an historical study in how people think and even why people reach to discover.

For anyone who has never heard of Timothy Ferris, this is a terrific book in which to begin.

More importantly, for the science-fiction fan who becomes impatient with non-fiction material, Coming of Age reads as quickly and as exciting as any well-written novel in the speculative fiction field. Even better, it provides a solid basis of understanding in physics, astronomy, cosmology, and even some philosophy by the end of the book. Because it's historical, it treats much more the mentality of discovery and tracing the paths of the human race than trying to commit to future theories and, as such, should earn a place in the historical annals many decades from today just as Herodotus and Thucydides are still read today as studies in classical history. It is the one non-fiction book that any strong adherent of science-fiction must read in order to bring new life to their own curiosity and imagination while grounding them firmly in reality.

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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Quantum Leap in a book, June 3, 2000

By 

Randal D. Locke "History Junkie" (Northern California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Coming of Age in the Milky Way (Paperback)

This is a wonderful book. A fine read, right from the start. Frankly, I am still slightly "giddy" from learning what a quantum leap really is, or at least thinking I have learned. I'm almost 50 but I think this is a wonderful book for younger readers. By younger, I mean older teens and twenty-somethings who will enjoy the entertaining approach to the universe Mr. Ferris provides. I don't currently have the book, it has been loaned to a young friend. I have a few more people in mind to whom I would like to loan the book. Mr Ferris deserves to make a good living (in my opinion), so maybe if you will take my humble word for it and buy this book, you will make up for the fact that I am going to spend the next few years loaning it out to people who won't or can't buy it. I personally read 50+ books a year including 'fatties' like the Ascent of Science by B.Silver. "Coming of Age" is one of my favorites. This book is fun, easy to read, has great stories, and it just kept getting more fun and more interesting right to the end. Buy it. Loan it to someone. Share the fun.