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Cosmos by [Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ann Druyan]

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Name: Cosmos 1st, Sagan, Carl, Tyson, Neil deGrasse, Druyan, Ann - Amazon.com
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Carl Sagan

Cosmos Kindle Edition

by Carl Sagan (Author), Neil deGrasse Tyson (Foreword), Ann Druyan (Introduction) Format: Kindle Edition

4.7 6,555 ratings

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RETURNING TO TELEVISION AS AN ALL-NEW MINISERIES ON FOX

Cosmos is one of the bestselling science books of all time. In clear-eyed prose, Sagan reveals a jewel-like blue world inhabited by a life form that is just beginning to discover its own identity and to venture into the vast ocean of space. Cosmos retraces the fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution that have transformed matter into consciousness, exploring such topics as the origin of life, the human brain, Egyptian hieroglyphics, spacecraft missions, the death of the Sun, the evolution of galaxies, and the forces and individuals who helped to shape modern science.

Praise for Cosmos

“Magnificent . . . With a lyrical literary style, and a range that touches almost all aspects of human knowledge, Cosmos often seems too good to be true.”—The Plain Dealer

“Sagan is an astronomer with one eye on the stars, another on history, and a third—his mind’s—on the human condition.”—Newsday

“Brilliant in its scope and provocative in its suggestions . . . shimmers with a sense of wonder.”—The Miami Herald

“Sagan dazzles the mind with the miracle of our survival, framed by the stately galaxies of space.”—Cosmopolitan

“Enticing . . . iridescent . . . imaginatively illustrated.”—The New York Times Book Review

NOTE: This edition does not include images.

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8 - 12 years
Print length

439 pages
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English
Grade level

3 - 7
Publisher

Ballantine Books
Publication date

July 6, 2011
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9780307800985
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What does seventy million years mean to beings who live only one-millionth as long? We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.
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What a marvelous cooperative arrangement—plants and animals each inhaling the other’s exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away.
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Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. It is, in a way, the opposite of Chaos. It implies the deep interconnectedness of all things. It conveys awe for the intricate and subtle way in which the universe is put together.
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Magnificent . . . With a lyrical literary style, and a range that touches almost all aspects of human knowledge, Cosmos often seems too good to be true.”—The Plain Dealer

“Sagan is an astronomer with one eye on the stars, another on history, and a third—his mind’s—on the human condition.”—Newsday

“Brilliant in its scope and provocative in its suggestions . . . shimmers with a sense of wonder.”—The Miami Herald

“Sagan dazzles the mind with the miracle of our survival, framed by the stately galaxies of space.”—Cosmopolitan

“Enticing . . . iridescent . . . imaginatively illustrated.”—The New York Times Book Review --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Amazon.com Review

Cosmos was the first science TV blockbuster, and Carl Sagan was its (human) star. By the time of Sagan's death in 1996, the series had been seen by half a billion people; Sagan was perhaps the best-known scientist on the planet. Explaining how the series came about, Sagan recalled:

I was positive from my own experience that an enormous global interest exists in the exploration of the planets and in many kindred scientific topics--the origin of life, the Earth, and the Cosmos, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, our connection with the universe. And I was certain that this interest could be excited through that most powerful communications medium, television.

Sagan's own interest and enthusiasm for the universe were so vivid and infectious, his screen presence so engaging, that viewers and readers couldn't help but be caught up in his vision. From stars in their "billions and billions" to the amino acids in the primordial ocean, Sagan communicated a feeling for science as a process of discovery. Inevitably, some of the science in Cosmos has been outdated in the years since 1980--but Sagan's sense of wonder is ageless. --Mary Ellen Curtin

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter I

The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean

The first men to be created and formed were called the Sorcerer of Fatal Laughter, the Sorcerer of Night, Unkempt, and the Black Sorcerer . . . They were endowed with intelligence, they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world. When they looked, instantly they saw all that is around them, and they contemplated in turn the arc of heaven and the round face of the earth . . . [Then the Creator said]: “They know all . . . what shall we do with them now? Let their sight reach only to that which is near; let them see only a little of the face of the earth! . . . Are they not by nature simple creatures of our making? Must they also be gods?”

—The Popol Vuh of the Quiché Maya

The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land.

—T. H. Huxley, 1887

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

Those explorations required skepticism and imagination both. Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere. Skepticism enables us to distinguish fancy from fact, to test our speculations. The Cosmos is rich beyond measure—in elegant facts, in exquisite interrelationships, in the subtle machinery of awe.

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls. Some part of our being knows this is from where we came. We long to return. These aspirations are not, I think, irreverent, although they may trouble whatever gods may be.

The dimensions of the Cosmos are so large that using familiar units of distance, such as meters or miles, chosen for their utility on Earth, would make little sense. Instead, we measure distance with the speed of light. In one second a beam of light travels 186,000 miles, nearly 300,000 kilometers or seven times around the Earth. In eight minutes it will travel from the Sun to the Earth. We can say the Sun is eight light-minutes away. In a year, it crosses nearly ten trillion kilometers, about six trillion miles, of intervening space. That unit of length, the distance light goes in a year, is called a light-year. It measures not time but distances—enormous distances.

The Earth is a place. It is by no means the only place. It is not even a typical place. No planet or star or galaxy can be typical, because the Cosmos is mostly empty. The only typical place is within the vast, cold, universal vacuum, the everlasting night of intergalactic space, a place so strange and desolate that, by comparison, planets and stars and galaxies seem achingly rare and lovely. If we were randomly inserted into the Cosmos, the chance that we would find ourselves on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion (1033, a one followed by 33 zeroes). In everyday life such odds are called compelling. Worlds are precious.

From an intergalactic vantage point we would see, strewn like sea froth on the waves of space, innumerable faint, wispy tendrils of light. These are the galaxies. Some are solitary wanderers; most inhabit communal clusters, huddling together, drifting endlessly in the great cosmic dark. Before us is the Cosmos on the grandest scale we know. We are in the realm of the nebulae, eight billion light-years from Earth, halfway to the edge of the known universe.

A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars—billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone. Within a galaxy are stars and worlds and, it may be, a proliferation of living things and intelligent beings and spacefaring civilizations. But from afar, a galaxy reminds me more of a collection of lovely found objects—seashells, perhaps, or corals, the productions of Nature laboring for aeons in the cosmic ocean.

There are some hundred billion (1011) galaxies, each with, on the average, a hundred billion stars. In all the galaxies, there are perhaps as many planets as stars, 1011 × 1011 = 1022, ten billion trillion. In the face of such overpowering numbers, what is the likelihood that only one ordinary star, the Sun, is accompanied by an inhabited planet? Why should we, tucked away in some forgotten corner of the Cosmos, be so fortunate? To me, it seems far more likely that the universe is brimming over with life. But we humans do not yet know. We are just beginning our explorations. From eight billion light-years away we are hard pressed to find even the cluster in which our Milky Way Galaxy is embedded, much less the Sun or the Earth. The only planet we are sure is inhabited is a tiny speck of rock and metal, shining feebly by reflected sunlight, and at this distance utterly lost.

But presently our journey takes us to what astronomers on Earth like to call the Local Group of galaxies. Several million light-years across, it is composed of some twenty constituent galaxies. It is a sparse and obscure and unpretentious cluster. One of these galaxies is M31, seen from the Earth in the constellation Andromeda. Like other spiral galaxies, it is a huge pinwheel of stars, gas and dust. M31 has two small satellites, dwarf elliptical galaxies bound to it by gravity, by the identical law of physics that tends to keep me in my chair. The laws of nature are the same throughout the Cosmos. We are now two million light-years from home.

Beyond M31 is another, very similar galaxy, our own, its spiral arms turning slowly, once every quarter billion years. Now, forty thousand light-years from home, we find ourselves falling toward the massive center of the Milky Way. But if we wish to find the Earth, we must redirect our course to the remote outskirts of the Galaxy, to an obscure locale near the edge of a distant spiral arm.

Our overwhelming impression, even between the spiral arms, is of stars streaming by us—a vast array of exquisitely self-luminous stars, some as flimsy as a soap bubble and so large that they could contain ten thousand Suns or a trillion Earths; others the size of a small town and a hundred trillion times denser than lead. Some stars are solitary, like the Sun. Most have companions. Systems are commonly double, two stars orbiting one another. But there is a continuous gradation from triple systems through loose clusters of a few dozen stars to the great globular clusters, resplendent with a million suns. Some double stars are so close that they touch, and starstuff flows between them. Most are as separated as Jupiter is from the Sun. Some stars, the supernovae, are as bright as the entire galaxy that contains them; others, the black holes, are invisible from a few kilometers away. Some shine with a constant brightness; others flicker uncertainly or blink with an unfaltering rhythm. Some rotate in stately elegance; others spin so feverishly that they distort themselves to oblateness. Most shine mainly in visible and infrared light; others are also brilliant sources of X-rays or radio waves. Blue stars are hot and young; yellow stars, conventional and middle-aged; red stars, often elderly and dying; and small white or black stars are in the final throes of death. The Milky Way contains some 400 billion stars of all sorts moving with a complex and orderly grace. Of all the stars, the inhabitants of Earth know close-up, so far, but one.

Each star system is an island in space, quarantined from its neighbors by the light-years. I can imagine creatures evolving into glimmerings of knowledge on innumerable worlds, every one of them assuming at first their puny planet and paltry few suns to be all that is. We grow up in isolation. Only slowly do we teach ourselves the Cosmos.

Some stars may be surrounded by millions of lifeless and rocky worldlets, planetary systems frozen at some early stage in their evolution. Perhaps many stars have planetary systems rather like our own: at the periphery, great gaseous ringed planets and icy moons, and nearer to the center, small, warm, blue-white, cloud-covered worlds. On some, intelligent life may have evolved, reworking the planetary surface in some massive engineering enterprise. These are our brothers and sisters in the Cosmos. Are they very different from us? What is their form, biochemistry, neurobiology, history, politics, science, technology, art, music, religion, philosophy? Perhaps someday we will know them.

We have now reached our own backyard, a light-year from Earth. Surrounding our Sun is a spherical swarm of giant snowballs composed of ice and rock and organic molecules: the cometary nuclei. Every now and then a passing star gives a tiny gravitational tug, and one of them obligingly careens into the inner solar system. There the Sun heats it, the ice is vaporized, and a lovely cometary tail develops.

We approach the planets of our system, largish worlds, captives of the Sun, gravitationally constrained to follow nearly circular orbits, heated mainly by sunlight. Pluto, covered with methane ice and accompanied by its solitary giant moon Charon, is illuminated by a distant Sun, which appears as no more than a bright point of light in a pitch-black sky. The giant gas worlds, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn—the jewel of the solar system—and Jupiter all have an entourage of icy moons. Interior to the region of gassy planets and orbiting icebergs are the warm, rocky provinces of the inner solar system. There is, for example, the red planet Mars, with soaring volcanoes, great rift valleys, enormous planet-wide sandstorms, and, just possibly, some simple forms of life. All the planets orbit the Sun, the nearest star, an inferno of hydrogen and helium gas engaged in thermonuclear reactions, flooding the solar system with light.

Finally, at the end of all our wanderings, we return to our tiny, fragile, blue-white world, lost in a cosmic ocean vast beyond our most courageous imaginings. It is a world among an immensity of others. It may be significant only for us. The Earth is our home, our parent. Our kind of life arose and evolved here. The human species is coming of age here. It is on this world that we developed our passion for exploring the Cosmos, and it is here that we are, in some pain and with no guarantees, working out our destiny.

Welcome to the planet Earth—a place of blue nitrogen skies, oceans of liquid water, cool forests and soft meadows, a world positively rippling with life. In the cosmic perspective it is, as I have said, poignantly beautiful and rare; but it is also, for the moment, unique. In all our journeying through space and time, it is, so far, the only world on which we know with certainty that the matter of the Cosmos has become alive and aware. There must be many such worlds scattered through space, but our search for them begins here, with the accumulated wisdom of the men and women of our species, garnered at great cost over a million years. We are privileged to live among brilliant and passionately inquisitive people, and in a time when the search for knowledge is generally prized. Human beings, born ultimately of the stars and now for a while inhabiting a world called Earth, have begun their long voyage home.

The discovery that the Earth is a little world was made, as so many important human discoveries were, in the ancient Near East, in a time some humans call the third century b.c., in the greatest metropolis of the age, the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Here there lived a man named Eratosthenes. One of his envious contemporaries called him “Beta,” the second letter of the Greek alphabet, because, he said, Eratosthenes was second best in the world in everything. But it seems clear that in almost everything Eratosthenes was “Alpha.” He was an astronomer, historian, geographer, philosopher, poet, theater critic and mathematician. The titles of the books he wrote range from Astronomy to On Freedom from Pain. He was also the director of the great library of Alexandria, where one day he read in a papyrus book that in the southern frontier outpost of Syene, near the first cataract of the Nile, at noon on June 21 vertical sticks cast no shadows. On the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, as the hours crept toward midday, the shadows of temple columns grew shorter. At noon, they were gone. A reflection of the Sun could then be seen in the water at the bottom of a deep well. The Sun was directly overhead.

It was an observation that someone else might easily have ignored. Sticks, shadows, reflections in wells, the position of the Sun—of what possible importance could such simple everyday matters be? But Eratosthenes was a scientist, and his musings on these commonplaces changed the world; in a way, they made the world. Eratosthenes had the presence of mind to do an experiment, actually to observe whether in Alexandria vertical sticks cast shadows near noon on June 21. And, he discovered, sticks do.

Eratosthenes asked himself how, at the same moment, a stick in Syene could cast no shadow and a stick in Alexandria, far to the north, could cast a pronounced shadow. Consider a map of ancient Egypt with two vertical sticks of equal length, one stuck in Alexandria, the other in Syene. Suppose that, at a certain moment, each stick casts no shadow at all. This is perfectly easy to understand—provided the Earth is flat. The Sun would then be directly overhead. If the two sticks cast shadows of equal length, that also would make sense on a flat Earth: the Sun’s rays would then be inclined at the same angle to the two sticks. But how could it be that at the same instant there was no shadow at Syene and a substantial shadow at Alexandria? --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Carl Sagan (1934-1996) was the Director of Cornell University’s Laboratory for Planetary Studies. He played a leading role in the American space program and was an adviser to NASA since its inception. He briefed the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the Moon, and was an experimenter on the Mariner, Viking, Voyager, and Galileo expeditions to the planets. He helped solve the mysteries of the high temperatures of Venus (answer: massive greenhouse effect), the seasonal changes on Mars (answer: windblown dust), and the reddish haze of Titan (answer: complex organic molecules). For his work, Dr. Sagan received the NASA medals for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, and the Pulitzer Prize for The Dragons of Eden. His 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage won the Emmy and Peabody awards. The National Science Foundation declared that his “research transformed planetary science… his gifts to mankind were infinite.” --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004W0HZN4
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ballantine Books; 1st edition (July 6, 2011)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 6, 2011
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3591 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 439 pages

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Carl Sagan

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Carl Sagan was Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University. He played a leading role in the Mariner, Viking, and Voyager spacecraft expeditions to the planets, for which he received the NASA medals for Exceptional Scientific Achievement. Dr. Sagan received the Pulitzer Prize and the highest awards of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation, and many other awards, for his contributions to science, literature, education, and the preservation of the environment. His book Cosmos (accompanying his Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning television series of the same name) was the bestselling science book ever published in the English language, and his bestselling novel, Contact, was turned into a major motion picture.

Photo by NASA/JPL [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Too Religious for Me

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 6, 2022

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Fish are surrounded and sustained by water and thus take no notice of it. Similarly, humans often overlook that in which they live and move and have their being. One of the most brilliant of these is Carl Sagan, author of "Cosmos", one of the best-selling science books of the last century.

This volume grew out of the 13 episode series made for PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) which featured doctored/colorized photos and depictions of outer space. I don't mean that they are faked: but just as a geologist polishes a rock to reveal a pattern, or as a woodworker uses stain to bring out the grain of wood (adding color that was not there before) , so these space photos were prepared for visual brilliance. But the content of the book may be best described as science-fiction, beginning with solid and established science, then speculation based off of that, and then imagination- what could have happened. Here, the conceivable is mistaken for evidence.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition defines “cosmology” as:
1) The study of the physical universe considered as a totality of phenomena in time and space;
2) The astrophysical study of the history, structure, and constituent dynamics of the universe; and
3) A specific theory or model of this structure and these dynamics.
Note the assumption that the physical universe is “a totality,” a questionable or at least an unclear idea in view of the “Light Cone” concept, popularized by Stephen Hawking, the idea that no event can be affected by things beyond its light cone (since nothing can travel beyond the speed of light). Furthermore, the concept of history and even dynamics can at best be inferred and the quality of those inferences may be open to question, based on scientific theories. Again, as Hawking pointed out, all we know about physics is based on two theories, relativity and quantum mechanics, and these are inconsistent (they contradict each other is certain aspects).

Our Author imagines that his conception of the universe is greater than that of religion because he has learned to count higher than than others. He is impressed that he has discovered billions of galaxies and is sure that some of them have intelligent life. He assumes that the laws of physics are everywhere the same, a useful assumption but how much does this reveal about physics on/in the sun? And if conditions so close to home are inexplicable (though there are theories), how can we assume with as much confidence (con-with; fidence- faith) as our Author manifests that our understanding of physics apply light years away? Our understanding of physics necessarily presumes metaphysical assumptions, to which our Author is oblivious (at least in this book) as is the fish to water.

One example is the eternity of matter, a useful assumption, but this presumes a metaphysic and assumes the cosmos is a closed system where energy/matter cannot be created or destroyed. Can this be tested, the criterion of true science that our Author posits as the true validation of science? It cannot, not without leaving the closed system and then the would-be tester becomes a fish out of water (figuratively speaking) which cannot live outside the system that sustains him.

Since test-ability is our Author's own measure for science, much of what he asserts in the book falls short of this. Much of the speculation both as to the past and the future is not testable and qualify as fiction. It may be compelling fiction, appealing to some of our deepest sensibilities, wonder, awe, beauty, resonating with deep primal instincts, but here we have left the realm of rational science and wandered into myth, the realm of the subjective. It was all too religious for me.

This is a prime example of what I have sometimes referred to as "PBS paganism," the popularization (at public expense) of post-Christian values and beliefs, the dismissal of the latter as outmoded and the glamorization of the former. The unspoken assumption is that of progress. We know more and can do more than we could before. This increase in power does change the conditions in which we live. The shift from muscle power prior to the industrial revolution to machine power afterward enabled an economic parity for women who could operate a machine as easily as a man, and thus a movement for social equality. Whether this is progress or not depends on what is counted as evidence, what we are measuring, what pre-formed concepts we bring.

One of the pre-formed concepts exhibited in Cosmos is the notion of science as empiricism, and the argument that the ancient Ionian Greeks pioneered this type of thought. Yet in 1942 Oxford professor F. M. Cornford pointed out the dogmatic features of Ionian science, such as Anaximander’s doctrine that heated things expand and cooled things contract. We may applaud this insight, except that he specifically applied this to water which he could have tested by placing a jar of it outside on a frosty night, and observed that it, in fact, expanded and broke the jar. This is not to deny the Ionian achievement, recognized by Aristotle, of examining physis (the nature of a thing) utilizing math to identify patterns (ratio/rational), the same chain of insights which led to the affirmation of monotheism rather than polytheism’s anthropomorphic/mythological explanations of phenomena. But the Ionian “science” is not what Cosmos claims it is, grounded in observation and tested by experience/experiment. Our Author credits the Ionians with coming up with the concept of the atom, but fails to note that their concept was that atoms were irreducible parts of matter, a concept we have long discarded in favor of sub-atomic particles and atom splitting.

Toward the end of the book, our author waxes eloquent about multiple universe-theory and arguments that there are many (infinite!) parallel worlds, a clear case of the boundary between imagination and reality becoming permeable, if not overlooked altogether. We return to the path from which we departed, that of mythology based on imagination and speculation about what is fundamentally untestable. When science becomes religion, it loses its perspective, though it may address some of the human longings for faith and wonder which traditional religion satisfies, but certain intellectual elites deny themselves on principle. Though I learned some science from this volume, it was altogether too religious for me.

I listened to the audio book narrated by many readers but largely by LeVar Burton of PBS "Reading Rainbow." His pace and clarity were excellent but just a mite cloying at times when the text called for enthusiasm, wonder, or fervor.

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Math Student

A Classic

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 28, 2023

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I remember watching Dr. Sagan on TV as he presented it to our national audience. I followed his career and read Cosmos after receiving it for Christmas. How many much we have learned and accomplished in Space exploration. If you have a young girl or boy at home Cosmos wouldn’t be a bad choice as an introduction to Astronomy and our Universe.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 6, 2023

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A brief history of the universe and its inhabitants

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 29, 2011

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This book has not been revised since its first publications in 1980, but in the meantime our understanding of physics and biology has advanced significantly. Although the book is dated, the physical principle on which the universe is founded remains unchanged. The author is a brilliant physicist & philosopher, a cosmologist, a sociologist and a humanist who is at ease when he is describing the physics of spacetime and matter from which this cosmos evolved or formation of life on this planet or the scientific, political and sociological issues surrounding the space exploration. The author quotes extensively from the history of physics and biology, religious literature, world history, media and numerous other sources with which he is familiar, and discusses our responsibilities and commitment for the preservation of the planet and the universe. He not only touches on diverse topics with deep understanding but also communicates with his readers equally well.

The author describes his experiences with the American space program and NASA. He briefed the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the moon, and his wok with missions that explored the solar system. He is responsible for the universal message from earth (on a plaque) on spacecrafts Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, and the Golden Record (voice message) on Voyager mission. Many space missions he was associated with have left solar system; Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 10, and Pioneer 11. These spacecrafts will probably survive in interstellar space lot longer than human race. He gives reasonable amount of information about voyager missions and the possible problems it could have faced while entering the Jupiter's outer shell of high-energy charged particles or the need for small nuclear power plant for energy for its long flight farther away from sun. The geological wonders of Jovian moons Io, and his optimism of Voyager spacecraft entering the heliopause, the outer boundary of solar system in the middle of 21st century.

While discussing the personal and professional conflicts faced by German mathematician Johannes Kepler with the local Roman Catholic Church, and challenges he faced with the imperial mathematician, Tyco Brahe, to get access to his experimental data, the author makes it all come alive. Kepler and Newton represent critical transition in human history and their discovery that fairly simple mathematical laws pervade all of nature. Their accurate predictions of planetary motions based on experimental data are the first step in understanding of our interaction with the rest of the cosmos. The city of Alexandria, Egypt was a home for learning and culture and how it tragically ended life of a brilliant woman scientist known by the name of Hypatia. She stood at the epicenter of social forces that were manipulating free thinking and intellectual pursuit. The slavery sapped classical civilization of its vitality. The growing Christian church was consolidating power and attempting to eradicate scientific thought that it claimed to be paganism. She continued to teach and publish until 415 A.D., when local Cyril parishioners murdered her and her remains burned. Her name was long forgotten while Cyril became a saint.

Does our cosmos expand indefinitely or at some stage it starts contracting? The author draws an interesting analogy with Hindu scriptures of Upanishads and Puranas, which predicts that the universe undergoes the cycles of birth and death every one hundred Brahma years, where one day and a night of Brahma are about 8.64 billion years, approximately half the age of our universe. It is supposed that a universe is a dream of God who after one hundred Brahma years dissolves himself into a dreamless sleep, and the universe dissolves with him. After another Brahma century, he recomposes himself to another great cosmic dream.

The author concludes this book by stating that since consciousness arose on this planet and our immediate concern is our own survival, but our own survival is balanced by numerous cosmic forces. We owe our obligations to this planet and the universe and not just ourselves.

1. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
2. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
3. The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

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Tsutomu Odani

A must read for every thinking person on the earth!

Reviewed in Japan 🇯🇵 on November 7, 2020

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Every one concerned about the current and future human being’s survival needs to read!

ゆうむ

COSMOSのガイド

Reviewed in Japan 🇯🇵 on October 6, 2018

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２０世紀の米国で活躍した天才天文学者。数々の惑星探査計画に携わって、実効をあげている。だれにも優しく理解できるようにこころがけるそのパーソナリティーからサイエンスプログラムの案内人になった。それが「COSMOS」。日本でも幾度となく放映され、最新の天文学の知識を教えてくれた。レビュアーも中学生時代に夢中になって観たものだ。
　本書は、その番組に関してつづった書籍である。映像では表現できない部分について、述べた内容だ。
　日本では、もう少し判型が大きいタイプが、４分冊で発刊され、図解も多く、理解しやすい書だった。本書は、文章主体で、当然のごとく英文である。辞書片手で読み進めるぐらい、難しい言い回しはないと思う。
　ときに、本書は、米国業者から古書として購入した。紹介欄には、ハードカバーで読むことはできる「程度可」の評価とともに上場していた。米国の「可」とはどれぐらいの程度なのかも不明だったのだが、合理性を重んじる国民性だけあって、本当に読むことはできる、という程度であった…。そしてソフトカバーというかペーパーバックに近い装丁だった。仕様が違う。写真は間違いないようだ。ハードではなくソフトだったが。それから本書レビュー欄には、本書のほかに同名称のバンドの某音楽CDのレビューも混在している。検索ワードで、エンジンが混同しているのか、マーケットプレイスの振り分けシステムが問題か。
　古書の輸入は、日本水準を標準に考えないほうが、よいことを確認した。内容は申し分ないので、この星評価は、理不尽かもしれないが、米国人のモノに対する考え方には、賛同しかねる部分もあったので、この星とさせてもらう。

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　しばらくたって、新品の出品があるのを知った。かなりの高額本と送料に不安を覚えながらも発注してみた。発注後に改めて調べてみるとアメリカの片田舎の店だった。追跡も大変だった。着予定も正直読めなかった。
　届いた商品をみたとき驚いた。ハードカバーだったからだ。つまり、原書はハードカバーとソフトカバーがあったわけだ。最初の購入時は、ハードカバーの口上に対してソフトカバーがボロボロの状態で届いて落胆したのだ、が、今回はハードカバーが届いた。店によって、というか、地域住民性で、ここまで違うのか、というのを思い知らされた。
　届いた、リベンジ品は、すばらしいものだった。星評価を最高評価に変更したい。でも、Amazonの上場システムは、問題多々であることを再認識させられもした。発注者の不注意では片づけられないと思う。上場システムの再構築と改善を願いたい。

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Osama Wajed

Poor Formatting

Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on October 10, 2021

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I recently bought this book for my son, who is interested in astrophysics, but when he read it he said it was of poor formatting. I am sure it is a great book, but the publisher, Abacus, should have spent more time on the format. look at the photo to see what I mean.

It has no photos either, so I suggest buying a different copy by a better publisher.

One person found this helpful

DomTH

Avoid the paperback, buy the hardback with the illustrations

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 22, 2020

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The paperback has horrid, unreadable text, which is clearly supposed to be supported by colour illustrations. Buy a secondhand original hardback edition: it’s a larger size, an easier read and supported by over 250 full colour images. The same issue exists with Kenneth Clark’s book based on his Civilisation TV show.

37 people found this helpful

Chris W

Poor copy

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 23, 2020

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No images, poor formatting like an original's been scanned and reprinted. Not the original edition. Requested a refund from Amazon.

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