Customer Reviews

Parting the Cosmic Veil

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

 

 

This well written book is a nice effort to communicate basic features of modern astronomy and cosmology to a broad audience. Lang is a lucid and enthusiastic writer. The quality of illustrations is very good, which really enhances the book. Lang aims for broad coverage of not only the basic features of the universe but also who we came to our present understanding. There is a good balance of basic instruction and historical analysis. The discovery of the extent of the universe, universal expansion, the Big Bang, and some of the many surprising features of the universe such as pulsars and massive black holes are disoussed (and illustrated) quite well. Lang communicates the wonder of discovering the many unexpected and counter-intuitive phenomena that characterize the universe. He also shows how the development of astronomy and cosmology has been a function of developing new methods of observation, particularly as spinoffs of military technology, and is intertwined with developments in some fields of physics.

Lang gives a fascinating account of how our knowledge of the universe has greatly expanded in recent years. He summarises the results of ground-based and spacecraft observations. The latter include the 2 Voyagers that transited the outer solar system, Viking, and Galileo. Results are also garnered from Earth-orbiting satellites like IRAS and Hubble.

Without dealing out a lot of math (in fact, hardly any), Lang offers the interested reader an appreciation of how we can measure cosmological distances. And the various observations that explained how the universe evolved. A bit of theory is given, like how Willy Fowler and Subramanian Chandrasekhar deduced the evolution of the elements and their abundances. This was done both from observations of stars and from experiments in nuclear reactions, for many fission pathways.

The book has many colour and black and white photos of observations, that tie in well with the text.