Customer Reviews

Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos

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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.

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.

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.

Hirschfeld makes the science of astronomy come alive. Unlike books written by science journalists, this one is by a real astronomer who knows his material and explains it very, very well. I had little interest in astronomy until I read Parallax, but now I'm ready to go out and look at the heavens!

This is the best book on popular astonomy that I have read in many years, perhaps ever. It is hard to imagine a more balanced, better organized and readable description of a thorny technical topic than is presented here. In the mini-biographies of astonomers for 2,500 years, one is reminded ot Richard Rhodes book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" in which he capsules 20th century science, Chemistry in particular. Hirshfeld provides interesting and often amusing thumbnail sketches of all the Parallax protagonists from Aristarchus to the present. His descriptions of Tycho Brahe, Galileo and Kepler are particularlly vivid. I had always read that Tycho had his nose bitten off in a drunken brawl, but, alas, not so! It was in a drunken duel.

The balance of the book is outstanding; each progression of understanding of the magnitude of the problem is presented with equal weight. The actual magnitude and dimensions of the problem (physically measuring the movement of a star from the exremes of the earths orbit) are described in bite sized increments, until by the time that the problem is surmounted in the mid 1800s, the full appreciation of the achievement is inescapable. If genius is "an infinite capacitiy for details", then the astronomers, and Dr. Hirshfeld both fully qualify for the title.

I am enthusiastically recommending this book to every literate person I know. It is satisfying and mind stretching, beautifully constructed, illustrated and edited. A great book!

I hated to see this book come to it's conclusion. Dr. Hirshfeld did some great detective work and used just enough humor to keep me interested from cover to cover. The writing is easily understood by a layperson such as myself, yet I felt that I was guided along in the quest for the proof of where the Earth is positioned in the universe.

I don't mean the book, although it's very enjoyable. I mean the measurement of stars' parallax itself. As Hirshfeld describes it, the achievement required nearly every advance in scientific thinking and instrument-making developed over 2000 years or more. It also required lifetimes of dedication by some of the most magnificent nerds in all of recorded history.

Hirshfeld's telling spans sixteen chapters. Each one describes one advance in scientific thinking, or one scientific thinker. The story starts with checkered history of heliocentric world - an idea that was persecuted for centuries, sometimes at the hands of the scientists whose results gave it the greatest support. Next come a series of fantastic, often fanatic minds. Some, like Tycho Brahe or Galileo, find easy recognition among educated people. Others, like Bessel and Fraunhofer, might ring bells, but I would never have known of their astronomical interests except through this book. Yet others, like James Bradley, were totally unfamiliar to me until I read about their amazing dedication.

'Dedication' is hardly the word for some frame of mind so finely focussed on on task, to the exclusion of all others, for decades at a time. Fraunhofer, for example, discovered the spectral lines in the sun's light. Fraunhofer's main interest in this discovery was that each line held an exact, reliable place in the color spectrum. For the first time ever, Fraunhofer lines offered a quantitative way to specify color: not just "yellow," for example, but "the sodium D line." As an optical instrument maker, this let him describe and eliminate color-based problems that had plagued all other refractive optics to date. He left it to others to use the same techniques to analyze the chemical composition of the sun and distant stars.

Hirshfeld does several incredible jobs for this book. One is that he turns a centuries-long thread into an enjoyable tale. Another is that he helps even non-technical readers appreciate what "parallax" is and why it matters. Yet another is that he puts human faces to seemingly super-human achievements of measurement and science. I recommed this to anyone who care about how science at its best is done - and why.

-- wiredweird

In science, clever minds and precision equipment go hand in hand. Take string theory - it sounds great [and I personally hope it's correct], but we don't have the equipment needed to do the experiments. In the book Parallax by Alan W. Hirshfeld, we take an almost two thousand year journey through history trying to confirm or deny the existence of stellar parallax - the apparent motion of a star due to the Earth's revolution. Hirshfeld introduces us to great scientific mind after scientific mind, all who knew exactly what they should see, but all thwarted in their efforts until the science of telescope making caught up with their brilliant minds. Since we know where the journey ends, part of the fun of reading Parallax comes from Hirshfeld's vivid portraits of the lives of the philosophers, astronomers, and instrument makers involved with finding stellar parallax. My favorite portrait was of Joseph Fraunhofer, telescope maker extraordinaire and survivor of incredible childhood trauma. I highly recommend Parallax by Alan W. Hirshfeld to anyone with an interest in astronomy, the history of science, or instrument making.

This is very simply a great book. The writing is clear and engaging and the history and the science are well presented in a logical chronological order. The love of the author for his subject stands out on every page; and his enthusiasm is contagious - one feels like getting a telescope (if one doesn't already have one) and start exploring the heavens. The book also illustrates in the best and most painless of ways how scientists' work complements that of others - hence progress. Highly recommended!

While my reading tastes definitely lean towards contemporary fiction, I found Parallax a completely satisfying read in every way. Working chronologically through the great astronomers of the past, the author brings us along on an exciting ride of discovery where we observe how the accepted view of the universe and the earth's place in it slowly change over time, sometimes behind the scientific observations of the time, and sometimes ahead of them.

It's a wonderful story of a great and noble quest, with a palatable dash of science thrown in for good effect.