Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos [Hardcover]

Alan W. Hirshfeld (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2001

In the dramatic tradition of the best-selling Longitude, Parallax charts the historical path of observational astronomy’s most daunting challenge: measuring the distance to a star.

The greatest scientific minds applied themselves in vain to the problem across the millennia, beginning with the ancient Greeks. Not until the nineteenth century would three astronomers, armed with the best telescopes of the age, race to conquer this astronomical Everest—their contest ending in a virtual dead heat.

Against a sweeping backdrop filled with kidnappings, dramatic rescue, swordplay, madness, and bitter rivalry, Alan Hirshfeld brings to life the heroes of this remarkable story. Meet the destitute boy plucked from a collapsed building who becomes the greatest telescope maker the world has ever seen; the hot-tempered Dane whose nose is lopped off in a duel over mathematics; the merchant’s apprentice forced to choose between the lure of money and his passion for astronomy; and the musician who astounds the world by discovering a new planet from his own backyard.

Generously illustrated with diagrams, period engravings, and paintings, Parallax is an unforgettable tale that illuminates the distinctly human side of science.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Measuring distances to stars and planets by parallax observation that is, by noting "the apparent shift in an object's position when the object is viewed from different vantage points" was based on a simple, accurate and archaic theory, known since Archimedes; however, putting the theory into successful practice was a 3,000-year exercise in frustration and ruthless competition for astronomers, generations of whom were driven to distraction as seemingly fixed, finite numbers shifted minutely with each technological advance. Archimedes, Galileo and Copernicus slowly completed the first familiar laps of the astronomic race. According to Hirshfeld, director of astronomy at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, the pace quickens by the 1800s, as lesser-known astronomers focus on near stars, and concludes dramatically with two German and one English observer neck and neck as they finish rough proofs on different stars within months of one another. Hirshfeld breathlessly annexes familiar astronomical legends ("Imagine yourself in Aristarchus's sandals"), and his social history, though somewhat thin, engages. For instance, a teenage Wilhelm Struve, forebear of modern astronomy, was kidnapped into Napoleon's army but escaped out a second-story window, freeing himself to pursue parallax. The book comes just as the cosmic map begins to emerge in three dimensions: totally reliable parallax measurements were achieved only recently with satellite observations (in 1989, fewer than 1,000 stars were accurately mapped; now the number is 22,000). Some day, interstellar travelers will remember the stars of Hirshfeld's book Thomas Henderson, Friedrich Bessel and Struve the way geographers honor John Harrison, the man who first determined longitude. Illus. not seen by PW.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Parallax is the apparent movement of near objects against a distant "fixed" background and is a principle of distance measuring extendable from the tip of one's nose to the vault of the stars. How far away is that vault posed a fundamental challenge to astronomy, and the stratagems to discover answers actuates Hirshfeld's spry and humanized history; his work is a lively gallery of colorful and, of course, calculating characters. Parallax could also be utilized to prove whether the earth was in motion; but no star-shift was detected (nor could possibly be detected in the pretelescopic era), so Earth remained safely in the center of the universe and the stars just somewhere overhead. Hirshfeld relates how this picture crumbled at the hands of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, leaving only the problem of stellar distance. The solution came from a trio of astronomers in the 1830s who independently achieved the minute observations of stellar shifts that provided the stupefying truth that stars were light-years away. A delightful history of a crucial advance in knowledge. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: W. H. Freeman; 1ST edition (May 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0716737116
• ISBN-13: 978-0716737117
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,336,961 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alan Hirshfeld is Professor of Physics at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and an Associate of the Harvard College Observatory. He received his undergraduate degree in astrophysics from Princeton University in 1973 and his Ph.D. in astronomy from Yale in 1978. His widely praised book, "Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos," published in 2002 by Henry Holt & Co., chronicles the human stories involved in the centuries-long quest to measure the first distance to a star. His second book, "The Electric Life of Michael Faraday," published in 2006 by Walker & Co., describes the life and work of the 19th century scientist who developed the electric motor, electric generator, and many fundamental ideas about electricity, magnetism, and light. "Eureka Man: The Life and Legacy of Archimedes," published by Walker & Co. in 2009, was released in paperback in September 2010. Prof. Hirshfeld's "Astronomy Activity and Laboratory Manual," a collection of mathematical exercises for college astronomy courses, was published by Jones & Bartlett Learning in 2009. Recipient of second prize in the Templeton Foundation's international Power of Purpose essay competition and also a Griffith Observatory/Hughes Aircraft Co. national science writing award, Prof. Hirshfeld has lectured around the country about scientific history and discovery.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Race to Measure the Cosmos, a great adventure & a great read, July 28, 2001

By 

Susan McGinnis (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos (Hardcover)

I highly recommend and thoroughly enjoyed this delightful spellbinding journey through the history and science of astronomy and its quest to find stellar parallax. Parallax is full of humor, suspense and intrigue with insight into the creativity, genius, skill, perseverance and sometimes quirkiness of astronomy's founding fathers. I was fascinated by the human story, often all too human but more often inspirational, of each contributor in this scientific endeavor from the early Greeks through the Renaissance to 19th century Europe. Hirshfeld gives the reader an intimate sense of each of these great astronomers(Aristarchus, Copernicus, Gallileo, Kepler, Newton, Hooke, Bradley and many more) and what each contributed and made them tick.

Hirshfeld tells an impressive tale of the scientific mind and engineering skills, and their challenges, pursuits and perseverance against all obstacles, technical and political, to discover the scientific truths that the earth revolves around the sun and distances to the stars. The tale is wrought with pitfalls due to the enormity of the scale of the universe, the diversity of stars, the technological difficulty in inventing and improving the telescope and its usability, reliability and resolution in its early incarnations, and many preconceived misleading notions and an enormity of other stumbling blocks.

Reading Parallax, I imagined the frustration for over 2000 years knowing the basic principle of stellar parallax - measure the shift in position of a star relative to its background stars from opposite sides of the earth's orbit and geometry yields its distance - and not having the technology to measure it, for even the closest stars are very far away and therefore have very small parallaxes to resolve. Parallax gave me a sense of admiration for those early astronomers and their inspiration, insight, foresight and dogged determination, often in dire circumstances.

Alan Hirshfeld has a knack for helping the reader to visualize his descriptions of technical, physics and telescopic concepts and equipment. There are also great diagrams illustrating technical concepts and mechanical equipment that enhanced my reading experience, along with engaging tales of how telescopic equipment was invented, constructed and used over the centuries in pursuit of stellar parallax. Hirshfeld is especially charming when he relates his personal delightful stories from aspiring young amateur astronomer to professional astronomer and physics teacher.

Parallax is a compelling, informative, insightful and often humorous tale of the people, science and technology that race to find the parallax of a star. Parallax is a great scientific who-done-it, building on each scientist, their obstacles and innovations, giving the reader the anticipation of what scientist with what equipment will solve the technological challenge of measuring stellar parallax. I learned a lot of fun and interesting things about the people involved, the evolution of human ideas and technology, and the history of the pursuit.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stretching the imagination, June 19, 2001

By 

David Salsburg (New London, CT, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos (Hardcover)

This is a book that stretches your imagination. Just think of it, a method for determining the distance to the nearest stars by measuring the shift in position when viewed from one end of Earth's orbit and again from the other end! At least that is the basic idea. But, as Alan Hirshfeld points out, it took over 2000 years of attempts before it could be done.

Hirshfeld takes the reader through the controversy among the ancient Greeks of whether the earth or the sun was the center of the universe. The reason they did not follow Aristarchus, who proposed the sun as the center, and went with Ptolmey, who put the earth at the center, was that they could not detect parallax to any star. Hirshfeld discusses the complicated model Ptolmey had to create, and takes the reader through the immense mathematical efforts of Coprenicus and, again, the failure to detect parallax. He moves on to the disputes of the 16th and 17th centuries, the gradual realization that Aristotle was wrong when he said that God would not leave empty space between the heavenly spheres, but, in fact, that there were such great distances between the Earth and the nearest stars that the slight shift from parallax was smaller than any instrument was able to measure.

The books brings us the wonderful characters who were involved in this search for parallax from the slip shod but enthusiastic work of Robert Hooke to the precise careful observations of James Bradley to the final triumph in measuring parallax that occured in the last 19th century.

It is an exciting story, told with vigor and filled with wonderful sketches of amazing men. Even more amazing is the slow discovery of more and more about the universe. Hershfeld points out, for instance, that Galileo actually saw the planet Neptune when he was viewing the moons of Jupiter with his telescope but took it to be a distant star.

This book is filled with the wonderful romance of astronomy, peering out and letting the human mind travel millions and millions of miles into space.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A delightful read, astronomy history buffs will love it..., December 2, 2001

By 

John Rummel (Madison, WI) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos (Hardcover)

Along the lines of Longitude, where Dava Sobel took us on a walk through astronomical history with the focus on the effort to determine longitude at sea, Hirshfeld's "Parallax" is an engaging historical survey concentrating on efforts to detect that minute wobble of stars. Hirshfeld focuses on the personalities and people - which makes this story enjoyable and even riveting.

Copernicus' view of the heavens had long since prevailed - no serious person of science doubted that the Earth and planets orbited the sun. However, there was no concrete scientific evidence to prove the Copernican view. The acid test of the Earth's motion, slight displacement of stars in June and December, when the Earth is on opposite sides of its orbit, had still not been detected. Hirshfeld traces the story from the earliest Greeks through Hooke, Newton, Bessel, Bradley and many others. It's a great story, well told.