Customer Reviews

A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering In A New Era of Discovery

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I was expecting this book to be more about the discoveries made by the SDSS, but it was really the story of the project itself - from idea to reality. I wasn't disappointed, though - it was VERY interesting, and written in an extremely approachable and accessible tone, not at all stuffy or hard to follow. Most of the research for this book was based on interviews with the original members of the SDSS project, and there's a very friendly sense of familiarity throughout the book - all the lead scientists are referred to by their first names, and direct quotes are sprinkled through each chapter. It gives you a real sense of knowing the people and being right there with them while they tried to get the project off the ground. After I finished, I checked out the SDSS website [...] to see some of the pictures. I think astronomy pictures are very interesting, and it was mind-boggling to look at the pictures on the site and actually understand what lay behind them.

Highly recommended for just about anyone!

What is that grand and bold thing? " 'A Complete Survey of the Galaxies' " using a camera grid system with an unprecedented number of pixels for resolution to capture pictures in five different colors and determine redshift. Actually, the entire sky was not to be surveyed, but rather 25% of the northern sky. The project's 3.5 meter telescope was built and put into service at Apache Point in New Mexico. That, together with a 2.5 meter telescope mirror, permitted the observatory to eventually produce an avalanche of data (200 gigabytes of data a night). And that data, with the assistance of dedicated software, was funneled to various partner universities, the astronomical community at large and to the public on the Internet's SkyServer. Although a number of names were proposed for this grand undertaking, the final nod went to "Sloan Digital Sky Survey" (SDSS) in honor of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation which supplied part of the $25 million-plus financing.

A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering In A New Era of Discovery traces the development of SDSS from astronomer Jim Gunn's early (1987) thoughts about how to use an array of linked CCDs (charge-coupled device) to build a camera that would allow a telescopic view of 120 arc minutes (greatly expanded from the viewing abilities of the time) and employ very enhanced image resolution. In 1988, he and several other astronomers began networking for collaboration and funding among their colleagues. In time, the University of Chicago, Princeton, the Fermilab, and numerous other institutions worked together over the 1990's to get SDSS up and running. Instead of the projected two or three year schedule though, many setbacks of both a technical and managerial nature postponed actual operation until 2000. But then it produced the scientific riches of which its creators had dreamed. In 2006, a new phase, SDSS-II began and is scheduled to continue until 2014.

Ann Finkbeiner's lucid and detailed history of SDSS includes technical detail and in-depth insights into the members of the team that made the project possible. Beginning in 2007, she conducted interviews with over 70 of the individuals involved in the work, and the book deftly ties their stories and their opinions into the bigger picture. We learn why there were bottlenecks in the project flow. We learn about setbacks such as cracked mirrors and pipeline software that was written by different people and didn't fit together. We learn about the CCD camera Jim Gunn built and how carefully it needed to be installed and then monitored. We learn about how, once the data did flow, thousands of amateur astronomers helped categorize the documented galaxies, comparing their photos to a set of eleven types.

If you read and were fascinated by Anil Ananthaswamy's recent The Edge of Physics: A Journey to Earth's Extremes to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe, or previous volumes such as Mapping the Next Millenium: The Discovery of New Geographies, by Stephen S. Hall, A GRAND AND BOLD THING should go on your reading list. Even if you aren't generally a reader of popular science titles, you might become hooked by reading this accessible one. Finkbeiner possesses a gift for explaining the scientific and technical so that we can all appreciate the grand and bold thing that has been accomplished.

The cartoon view of an astronomer at work, with an eye tightly bound to an eyepiece which is attached to a huge tubular telescope pointed at the stars, is a caricature carryover from past times. Sure, there are plenty of amateur astronomers who enjoy looking through their telescopes that way, and even make discoveries thereby. But most professional academic astronomers aren't looking through their scopes that way. They are looking at computer screens (not the photographic plates that preceded such screens), if they are looking at any telescope output at all. A professional astronomer these days might not even go near a telescope, and it is increasingly unlikely that such an astronomer would work in isolation. Some astronomers would be managers of teams of other astronomers. Some would specialize in writing code that analyzes astronomical data. So astronomy is changing because of the tools available to it, and a surprising array of tools has been used to make the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the subject of a fine science book _A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering in a New Era of Discovery_ (Free Press) by Ann Finkbeiner. Finkbeiner, a science reporter who teaches science writing, knows her astronomy and cosmology, and presents a comprehensive view of this particular new way of doing astronomy. Even better, she has interviewed the people involved, and has shown how the project, and science in general, is a human effort by dedicated and flawed individuals ambitious to make names for themselves but also to make humans a little more knowledgeable.

Central to the story is the originator of the idea of the survey, Jim Gunn, who in 1987 came up with the idea of a new type of telescope, a device that would use charge-coupled devices (CCDs) which take tiny bits of light and turn them into digital information. A vast array of such devices would be attached to a modest-sized telescope (a mirror of 2.5 meters). It would not be just a new gadget, it would have a new goal: the camera would take images of huge swaths of the sky, and software would identify and classify thousands of stars, galaxies, and quasars. Gunn, who had helped make the telescope for the Hubble, spent six years in the basement of Princeton's astronomy hall building the 700-pound camera. An impressive technological feat in itself, it was not as revolutionary as the applications of information technology into which its data was fed. Astrocoders, astronomers who specialize in writing computer programs to analyze astronomical data, had to develop entirely new programs for the data from Sloan. There have been a huge number of scientific papers written about the data, with two-thirds of them being written by non-Sloanie astronomers who get the information online. Sloan has produced a remarkable democratization of science. Not only do astronomers without their own telescopes get to use the data, but curious lay people can, too, and can really do science. This is best shown by the Galaxy Zoo program, which has involved hundreds of thousands of citizen scientists. For all their power and data, computers are not so good at identifying galaxy shapes as spiral or elliptical. Humans are very good at such identifications. The Sloanies put their million galaxies on the internet, asked for people to click on one galaxy after another to designate the shape, and the first day after the request the servers melted down from too many volunteers. The problem proved solvable, and not only are the Zooites helping with designations, they are finding new things, like unexpected round green galaxies that are now known as Green Pea galaxies.

Finkbeiner's book is a lovely tribute to a spectacularly successful scientific project, one which has truly changed the way astronomy can be done. The Sloan project was complicated and huge and required astronomers who had previously been loners to play on a big team. There were turf battles and conflicts along the way which are described here, but as one astronomer said, "Most of these people did not have the slightest concept of how to work together. But everybody behaved well enough, long enough, that it succeeded." It's the sort of lesson on display in many of these pages, making this book of science a special pleasure to read for its optimism.

I bought and read this book, because it deals with the history of SDSS, a project that started in late 80s and is now in its third incarnation. As a scientist I spend most of my time working on BOSS, which is part of SDSS3 and so I was interested in reading this, especially given that I wasn't around when the interesting things happened. The book is good for me, because it deals primarily with: a) the horrible politics surrounding such big project and b) the way how SDSS changed the way we do astronomy these days. It doesn't do too much science though and when it does it is neither very accurate nor very well organised or focused. So, if you want to buy it for learning about what SDSS did - don't. Also, there is some stretching of truth here and there. For example, as someone who actually attended a couple of collaboration meetings, I have never heard of anyone referring to ourselves as Sloanies (or Threeons). I have hard time believing Zeljko Ivezi' is the same to LSST as what Jim Gunn was to Sloan (and this is not to say that Zeljko is not super competent, just that LSST is one big corporate beast run by particle physicist where everyone is replaceable by construction). She completely skips big chunks of exciting science and everything revolves too much around Jim Gunn (yes, he is a walking legend, very intelligent dude, everything is cool, but we should get over personality cults at some point). Still, there are anecdotes in the book to tell on wintry nights in warm pubs and this is why it is still a must read for every one of us.

The book gives inside info about what a major astronomical project has to cope with: funding, timing, technological complexity, scientific complexity en personnel. In the end successful and a break-through in the way astronomers get their data.
It is written in a very accessible style and a pleasure to read.

Finkbeiner is in John McPhee territory with this most excellent piece of writing. You're practically inside the scientists' heads as they first imagine then create the extraordinary telescope that will give us our first views of the edges of the universe and its birth.

It is a treat to read about the creation of one of the greatest scientific projects of all time - the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). To take so many individualistic scientists, programmers and engineers with such a diversity of personalities and compress them to form a confluence of efforts necessary to map the universe and make it available to all is a grand a bold story in itself. Ann Finkbeiner does a wonderful job of revealing the rugged trails that had to be blazed in order to accomplish each of the monstrous tasks set before them.

The few complex science examples presented to illustrate just a sample of the work coming forth by scientists using SDSS data was kept understandable by the lucid explanations presented.

I knew I was going to like this book before I finished the first page, though I wondered if that feeling would hold true to the end. It did, ending with an especially unforgettable warm and fuzzy account of deserved tribute.

Way to go Sloanies!

Had I paid more attention to who the author was when I purchased this book, I might have had second thoughts. Finkbeiner has done the same, exact job with this topic as she did with The Jasons. I should think watching Stephen Hawking stare back at me from his chair would constitute a more entertaining evening than reading Finkbeiner's material. This woman writes with all the excitement of a mannequin. BORING! Sure, she's dutiful and factual. Beyond that however....

Look, this is hardly an exciting topic from the get go--most of it anyway. And her black and white descriptions of events serve nothing but to simply cross off a checklist of chronological markers in the history of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

There were hints of possibility here, but clearly Finkbeiner blew them off and didn't have the stomach to go after them (or perhaps her editors thought she shouldn't). A much more detailed technical history of the project would have made for a far richer book; admittedly appealing to a smaller audience. Instead what the reader gets is roughly 200 pages of 'Jim replaced Joe as project manager', 'The engineers were over budget and off schedule', 'Bill was a scientist, not a bean counter' and on and on and on. Really? Every book ever written about grandiose modern exploration in one form or another, has included this kind of filler. Yeah we get it--BIG PROJECT....DIFFICULT PEOPLE....POLITICS....MONEY NOWHERE...But that's really all she writes about for 200 shallow pages.

I would have greatly enjoyed a much larger and in-depth book concentrating on only a few key people, with far less talk of the minutiae of the administering of the project, and instead with infinitely greater detail on the technical side. But apparently Finkbeiner isn't the author capable of delivering that kind of book, as she has proven in the past. Too bad. Honestly, this woman's writing style is sleep inducing.

The author addresses the subject in a very easy to understand text. You'll feel very "small" after the first few pages!

I saw the review in Wall Street Journal and can only guess the reviewer did not read the book. The topic is fascinating -- the effort to create a comprehensive map of the universe. However, the book is a mishmash of chatty quotes from the participants in an attempt to make them seem like quirky celebrities worthy of admiration. Thats interesting in itself if you want to know about the personalities of astronomists but the book does not go into what they actually discovered. For anyone seeking to find out what knowledge has been synthesized in the last decade the book will be very dissapointing. In fairness the author does not promise this but the WSJ review did.