Customer Reviews

Seeing and Believing: A Short History of the Telescope and How we Look at the Universe

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This is a very enjoyable book! As a professional astronomer, I can only recommend this book to all people interested on the impact that the telescope had in the history of mankind. Although there is no deep technical description of telescopes here, this is not the point. The telescope has changed and is still changing the way we see the Universe and Panek does a very good job at describing the major contributions of this wonderful invention.

My only complaint is that the last chapter might be a bit too rushed compared to the previous ones since it basically reviews all modern astronomy in about 20 pages. But, otherwise, strongly recommended!

Richard Panek has outdone even his fine Waterloo Diamonds book. In Seeing and Believing, he unites science, history, and philosophy in a very accessible and dramatic way. I would think anyone concerned with contemporary technology issues will want to devour this book, and that it would make a stellar holiday gift for any thinking person.

I've read a lot of books about telescopes and the history of astronomy so I was somewhat skeptical that this small format text from 1998 would be all that interesting. But it only took a few pages' reading to realize that this book was something special. It is not a bare bones recital of the standard history you read in other books, where other books summarize Galileo and the telescope in a sentence or two and then move on, Panek devotes about a 1/3 of the book to what happened *after* Galileo made his telescope but *before* the next advance in telescope design. What happened was that astronomers changed their whole way of thinking about the universe, starting with convincing themselves that the image in the telescope was actually a reality, and not some distortion of their vision. When refracting telescopes were improved later, astronomers dismissed them because the image was upside down! It was only years later that they realized it didn't matter in astronomy what was up and what was down. I've never read about this in any other books.

In addition to an in-depth study of the Galileo period, William Herschel gets a large portion of the book. This is also fascinating and new because most books mention his work (a huge star catalog, discovery of Uranus), but little about the man himself. It's interesting to see here how a musician giving 8 lessons a day becomes the astronomer to the king.

Lastly Hale and Hubbard get their due. Again with more insight into Hale than I've gotten out of hour-long documentaries on TV.

It helps to have been exposed to some of this material elsewhere, since this book had no illustrations or photos. But it certainly fills in some gaps in history that you will find interesting.

Even if you know nothing about astronomy --even if you don't care about astronomy -- you will love this book. It is written so gracefully, so unpretentiously (no 'we are starstuff' bombast) and the story it tells is so intriguing, that even science-shy readers can enjoy -- and learn. (I know because I am one.) The book is very pretty ,too -- small and slender, and with a lovely cover. A perfect present.

If you've read "Longitude," by Dava Sobel, and liked it, you'll like Panek's book as well. "Longitude" is the story of the invention of a chronometer sufficiently accurate to allow navigation to a desired longitude. It was instrumental in the mapping and exploration of earth. Similarly, "Seeing and Believing" is the story of another important invention, the telescope, which allowed us to map the cosmos and, as the subtitle says, find our place in the universe.

The story of the telescope begins with glass. More than 100 years before the invention of the telescope people fashioned glass into lenses that corrected poor eyesight, and found practical applications in such things as reading spectacles. It seems odd, I think, that it took so long for someone conceive of using two lenses in a tube to magnify the appearance of distant objects. [Then again, most things seem trivial in hindsight. Original thought is often underrated, and what we mistake as intelligence is often nothing more than the common man's ability to learn tricks taught by genius.]

Most of us have heard of Galileo. He is famous for his use of the telescope, and for his confrontations with the Catholic Church. But Galileo wasn't the inventor of the telescope (though he made significant contributions to the telescope's design). Galileo's genius was in the way he used the telescope to study the heavens, the conclusions he drew from those observations, and how those observations began a scientific and philosophical revolution that emphasized experimentation as the foundation of science.

Before the invention of the telescope the idea hadn't yet been hatched that an instrument could bring distant, essentially invisible, objects into clear view. There were initial suspicions that the telescope was just an elaborate hoax; an optical illusion. This suspicion was aided by design flaws in early telescopes that resulted in large optical aberrations, especially near the edges of the lenses. Placing myself in this historical context I find a certain amount of empathy for the skeptics. But it was overdone. Even when the telescope proved its validity through unambiguous verification, by demonstrating the ability to discern distant terrestrial objects, there was still a suspicion that it might view celestial objects with less accuracy. Old ideas die hard.

It wasn't just healthy skepticism that resulted in initial criticism of celestial observations with the telescope. These observations were diametrically opposed to the philosophical constructs of the day. What these observations showed us was the picture of a universe that was utterly inconsistent with those favored by the religious and philosophical leaders of the day. Eventually, though, even religion couldn't stop the march of progress. The telescope's utility and its power to challenge belief by seeing (as the old saying goes, seeing is believing) led to a revolution not only in our understanding of the cosmos, but the observational bedrock of modern science itself.

A good part of the book takes us up through the story of Galileo, but it doesn't end there. Other astronomers used the telescope to continue to expand our view of the universe. The story has been a rapid one. It wasn't that long ago (within the last century) that scientists weren't sure if the galactic nebula were clouds or groups of stars. Our local galaxy, the Milky Way, was no different. Within the last 100 years the telescope has been at the forefront of a revolution that has expanded the size of the known universe billions of light years and brought into view strange new phenomena like dark matter, black holes, neutron stars, and super novae.

Today's modern telescopes are very different, yet much the same, as the one Galileo first peered through. They are monumental instruments of incredible complexity. Optical telescopes are huge behemoths that use compound mirrors with active focusing to compensate for thermal currents in the earth's atmosphere. Other telescopes, like Hubble, look outside the obscuring atmosphere for an uncluttered look at the universe. Still others explore the universe at very long (infrared) wavelengths, microwave wavelengths, and even radio wavelengths. While they do, a new generation of telescopes, like the European Space Agency's (ESA) XMM-Newton X-ray satellite, explores the universe at wavelengths indicative of the most violent activity in the universe.

Though different in almost all their mechanical respects, modern telescopes do one thing essentially the same as Galileo's instrument; they open up the universe to our view and explode many of our pre-existing concepts about the universe. And, perhaps most importantly, they guide our quest to understand our place in the universe.

This is a small book with a surprising amount of information within its pages. It can be read easily in a week, and it's small enough to carry to the park or library. The book is easy to read, very well written, entertaining and informative. I thoroughly loved it.

The key word in the subtitle is "Minds" as one soon learns. In the first half of the book, Panek describes how the telescope opened our eyes to the heavens and as the second half begins, he opens our eyes to how the progression began in earnest to the opening of our minds to the heavens. Certainly Galileo opened many minds to possibilities in the heavens that they had not considered: mountains on the Moon, moons orbiting Jupiter, phases of Venus, and so forth. What the eyes could see through the Galileo's perspicillum belied what our minds at the time could see, and the stretching of people's minds is treacherous endeavor, as he soon found out. But with stretching, people's minds do open, and the mind-opening exercises of Galileo prepared future centuries of star-gazers for quasars, pulsars, black holes, and a universe far greater than any of Galileo's contemporaries could have ever imagined.

[page 1] "On January 15, 1996, the universe grew by forty billion galaxies."

On the next page, Panek amends his statement to say, "What actually grew that morning, of course, wasn't the size of the universe, but our understanding of it." What happened that morning was a photo made of a single spot of the universe, as small as a grain of sand at arm's length, by the Hubble Space Telescope that was focused on that spot for ten entire days. They found almost 2,000 galaxies in that grain of sand speck of our night sky, which multiplied by the size of the rest of the sky approximates fifty billion galaxies. And this was only looking at visible light. What scientists found was more light than they ever expected and also more dark. Dark spaces for the first time appeared between galaxies, indicating that perhaps we had reached the end of universe with our instruments. Many questions arose.

[page 3] ". . . sometimes the best answer a scientist could want is more questions."

There weren't very many unanswered questions about the structure of the universe when Galileo made his first "tube of long seeing" by modifying a spyglass of a Dutch craftsman and turned it to familiar night sky. Planets and stars were pinpoints of light, everybody knew that; no questions were asked so nobody looked. But when Galileo looked at the night sky through his telescope he saw for the first time in the history of the Earth that planets had size and shapes and colors whereas stars remained pinpoints of light. He saw three pinpoints of light near Jupiter and as he observed on successive nights, sometimes he'd see two of them to the left of Jupiter and sometimes two to the right. How could Jupiter be moving so as to cause theses stars to dart about the planet so? Faced with this unanswerable question, he dared think the previously unthinkable: Perhaps the dots of light were moons orbiting Jupiter! What his eyes saw was incomprehensible until he opened his mind to new possibilities. Each generation since our minds have stretched farther and farther open as our instruments record previously incomprehensible data from the heavens.

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