Customer Reviews

From Here to Infinity: The Royal Observatory Greenwich Guide to Astronomy

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This book provides a concise (perhaps too concise) and richly illustrated description of the Universe, starting with the Earth and finishing with speculations about how life originated. I would like to think that this book doesn't include anything I wasn't vaguely familiar with before, but I found it useful to have it all in the one place. The illustrations are of high quality, and pretty to look at, just on their own. The shortness of the book is a problem; there's only about 230 pages, and the illustrations take up many of the pages, so the statements of fact tend to be a little terse. For example, on page 48, it is stated about the Earth; 'By 400 million years ago, the fossil record shows that it was spinning once every 22 hours,..." I can see why it would have been spinning faster, but I can't understand how the fossil record would have shown this, so it's obvious I am going to have to do some more reading about this.