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"What you keep by you, you may change and mend but words, once spoken, can never be recalled."
- Earl of Roscommon
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ZIN Product Number: 10193907
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| | | |  | | | Product Details
 Format: Hardcover, 176 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691048746
Release Date: Jan 4, 2002
Average Reader Review:  (Based on 2 reviews.)
| |  | | | From The Publisher
In 2004, Venus will cross the sun's face for the first time since 1882. Some will not bother to step outside. Others will plan for years, reserving tickets to see the transit in its entirety. But even this group of astronomers and experience seekers will be attracted not by scientific purpose but by the event's beauty, rarity, and perhaps--after this book--history. For previous sky-watchers, though, transits afforded the only chance to determine the all-important astronomical unit: the mean distance between earth and sun.
Eli Maor tells the intriguing tale of the five Venus transits observed by humans and the fantastic efforts made to record them. This is the story of heroes and cowards, of reputations earned and squandered, told against a backdrop of phenomenal geopolitical and scientific change. With a novelist's talent for the details that keep readers reading late, Maor tells the stories of how Kepler's misguided theology led him to the laws of planetary motion; of obscure Jeremiah Horrocks, who predicted the 1639 transit only to die, at age 22, a day before he was to discuss the event with the only other human known to have seen it; of the unfortunate Le Gentil, whose decade of labor was rewarded with obscuring clouds, shipwreck, and the plundering of his estate by relatives who prematurely declared him dead; of David Rittenhouse, Father of American Astronomy, who was overcome by the 1769 transit's onset and failed to record its beginning; and of Maximilian Hell, whose good name long suffered from the perusal of his transit notes by a color-blind critic.
Moving beyond individual fates, Maor chronicles how governments' participation in the first international scientific effort--the observation of the 1761 transit from seventy stations, yielding a surprisingly accurate calculation of the astronomical unit using Edmund Halley's posthumous directions--intersected with the Seven Years' War, British South Seas expansion, and growing American scientific prominence. Throughout, Maor guides readers to the upcoming Venus transits in 2004 and 2012, opportunities to witness a phenomenon seen by no living person and not to be repeated until 2117.
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 | | | | | Number of Reviews: 2 Average Rating:
From Unobserved to Key Measurements to Celestial Joy
-- Donald Mitchell, a management consultant from Boston, May 24, 2001
From Unobserved to Key Measurements to Celestial Joy
-- Donald Mitchell, a management consultant from Boston, May 24, 2001
| | | | The Reader's Catalog
A rare and intriguing celestial phenomenon—the planet Venus's transit across the face of the sun—gives the author of this book an occasion to explore the vicissitudes of scientific study through the ages.|
| |  | | | The Word On The Street
This is a very well written book, providing a wealth of historical facts.
—Joe Rao, Haydan Planetarium —Joe Rao
The book gathers much historical information not readily available, on a topic not frequently treated…An entertaining book readily understandable to a general audience.
—Jack Zirker, author of Total Eclipse of the Sun —Jack Zirker
| |  | | | Find similiar books in these subject areas:
All Topics > Science > Astronomy > Astronomy
All Topics > Science > Astronomy > Solar System
All Topics > Science > History & Philosophy > History of Science
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| | | | | | Keywords
Venus (Planet), Transit, 2004, Celestial Mechanics, Science, History, Astronomy - Solar System, Astronomy - General
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