Customer Reviews

The Road to Galaxy Formation (Springer-Praxis Books in Astrophysics and Astronomy)

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this is one of those books that is indispensable not because it is comprehensive or groundbreaking, but because it brings the reader into the center of the science it describes. by turns skeptical or tendentious, expansive or selective, the reader is given the recent history of cosmology (including thumbnail portraits of some of the major protagonists, such as zwicky), the development of concepts and evidence, the major interpretations of the evidence with their residual questions and mysteries, and finally a review of some future proposed space and earth observatories. the narrative begins with "a cosmological cartoon" (cartoon here meaning "sketch") that lays out the key elements -- red shift, relativity, large scale structure and microwave background -- then builds cumulatively to a theory of how galaxies form from stars and gas, and evolve a variety of forms, clusters and interactions. attention is directed to the various forms of observational bias that distort out understanding of what and how much is really out there, and popular glamor topics (such as black holes) take a back seat to the effort to understand the universe as an evolving ecology of enormous dimensions. all in a book that can be easily completed in a week of evenings.

Most advanced astronomy books fall into two categories: textbooks and conference proceedings. The case is similar for the topic of galaxy evolution. Textbooks are not that essential for observational astronomers, while conference proceedings are often of very non-uniform quality and by their nature are very discrete in coverage. "The Road to Galaxy Formation" (currently in its second edition) fills the void for a good overview of modern observational study of galaxy evolution. It quickly covers basics and then goes into a very insightful overview of the current state of knowledge and many unresolved problems. The level and the style of the book is that of some expertly written (and interesting) discussion section in an astronomy paper. Focusing on observational results, the book is almost devoid of equations, but has a number of key plots and figures and references to astronomical papers. For graduate students this book can be an excellent way to get an overview of the field without reading hundreds of papers, while for more advanced researchers it can serve to put their research into perspective and gain some additional insight.