Customer Reviews

Night Has a Thousand Eyes: A Naked-Eye Guide to the Sky, Its Science and Lore

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An end to the lonely ameteur astronomer on the top of a hill with only a thermos and a telescope for company, The night has a thousand eyes... is a brilliant source of not only cold faced fact but eye popping stories and history. It is hard not to be impressed by the light from a star seventy billion years old, and this book keeps you enthralled. I have just finished reading it and I want to read it again. You don't need a degree in astronomy to appreciate this book, nor is it 'dumbed down'for popularity. The only problem, and its a small one, is the book's tendency to wander into territory not enirely connected with the subject. On the whole, though, it beats the thermos any day.

This is a pretty good book for astronomy buffs, etc. There was one paragraph, though, where the author falls into bad science.

Buying into the religion hates science paradigm, the author makes sure the reader knows that no one "held Copernicus and his theory [heliocentrisim] in lower esteem" than Martin Luther. The author claims this theory was a competing worldview on "somewhat equal ground" to Christianity. He goes on to say one [science] is based on "testing and questioning" while the other [Christianity] is based on "blind faith."

It is obvious, the author, Arthur Upgreen, has never studied the science versus religion debate closely. If he had, he would have never made such claims right after quoting the
works of Christians like Kepler, Galileo and Copernicus. Nor does he detail the errors that led to the geocentrisim interpretation/theory to begin with. Nor the fact that
Christianity has never been based upon "blind faith."

If geocentrisim and the Galileo Affair of centuries past continue to be such authors' best evidences for their belief, then they don't have much ground to stand on. Compare these and what few other "antiscience" events one finds in orthodox, rational Christianity to its pro-science history and scholars,
one finds the former doesn't even show up on the charts.

Why write all this all on one paragraph? Because there is so much bad science out there as there is, and so many don't like science, simply because people like this don't test what they believe.