Customer Reviews

Measuring the Universe: The Cosmological Distance Ladder (Springer Praxis Books / Space Exploration)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Many books present a current scientific world-view, as though nearly immutable. By contrast, Webb's book covers much of the history of cosmological distance measurement, including errors and changes-of-mind.

Webb's book proceedes in a very good, logical, historical order of measurements: the Earth, the Solar System, nearby stars, more distant stars, the Galaxy, the Local Group, more distant galaxies, the universe, yielding the current standard models.

It covers well the successive improvements and changes in theoretical models, as they adapted to fit new data. It is always insightful to see what people could do with fairly minimal data, and where they seemed to go wrong, and how those errors were later corrected.

This offers an especially good reminder that much science is a series of successive approximations, although sometimes a modest improvement of data accuracy may well overturn an existing theory.

It also emphasizes the dependence of the distances to further objects on relationships with nearer objects. Figure 11.6 seems an especially nice summary of the inter-relationships among the various measurement techniques.

Readers without some college-level math and physics background may find it a bit heavy-going. However, each chapter tends to be useful, with less math up front, so that one need only go as deep as is comfortable.

Webb is also to be complimented for at least mentioning dissenting views, such as those of Fred Hoyle or Halton Arp (as in "Seeing Red - Redshifts, Cosmology, and Academic Science").

All-in-all, this is a good book that ties together many problems and measurements in a coherent way.

This is an excellent account and a well-written history of how we meaure distances within the solar system, galaxy, cosmos. A reader without mathematical background could skip the equations and get much from the book. Someone more versed in technical language will get more than a simple introduction.