In the years since the publication of Hawking's A Brief History of Time, readers have repeatedly told Hawking of their great difficulty in understanding some of the book's most important concepts. This is the reason for A Briefer History: his wish to make its content more accessible to readers--as well as to bring it up-to-date with the latest scientific observations and findings. Purely technical concepts, such as the mathematics of chaotic boundary...

Tracing the evolution of humankind's pursuit of astronomical knowledge, this resource looks deep into the furthest reaches of space. Children will follow along as the realization that the Earth is not at the center of the universe leads all the way up to recent telescopic proof of planets orbiting stars outside the solar system. In addition to its engaging history, this book contains 21 hands-on projects to further explore the subjects discussed....

"The author of the highly acclaimed Founding Gardeners now gives us an enlightening chronicle of the first truly international scientific endeavor--the eighteenth-century quest to observe the transit of Venus and measure the solar system. On June 6, 1761, the world paused to observe a momentous occasion: the first transit of Venus between the earth and the sun in more than a century. Through that observation, astronomers could calculate the size of...

"This title shows how a group of European scientists, in the span of roughly one hundred and fifty years (early 1500s to the mid-1600s) and working through direct observation, overturned the centuries' old accepted view of a geocentric universe. Through their research and writings, they proposed and described a new order of things in which the Earth orbits the Sun. In so doing, these scientists--Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Galileo...

"Follow a spacecraft the size of a piano, named New Horizons, on the first ever spacecraft mission to Pluto, the space entity formerly known as a planet, in the latest addition to the epic and authoritative Scientists in the Field series."--

Nicolaus Copernicus was the first to place the sun--not the earth--at the center of the universe and did so in an outline in 1514. Over the following two decades he expanded on that theory, compiling in secret a book-length manuscript which he did not publish until 1543. Sobel chronicles the personalities and the discoveries that shaped the Copernican Revolution.

An English translation of Nicholaus Copernicus's 1543 text in which he expounds upon his heliocentric theory that the sun, and not the earth, is the center of the universe.

Only twenty-four people have seen the whole earth. The most beautiful and influential photographs ever made were taken, almost as an afterthought, by the astronauts of the Apollo space program from the moon. They inspired a generation of scientists and environmentalists to think more seriously about our responsibility for this tiny oasis in space, this "blue marble" falling through empty darkness. The Earth Gazers is a book about the long road to...

Meet a diverse group of highly original thinkers and learn about their lives and achievements: Galileo, a founding father of astronomy and physics; Christiaan Huygens, a seventeenth-century pioneer of wave-particle duality; and Isaac Newton, the English mathematician and physicist who laid the groundwork for a scientific revolution and promoted radical investigation as the means to reveal nature's hidden workings. This chronicle of physics and physicists...

Baron animates the fierce jockeying that came to dominate late nineteenth-century American astronomy, revealing the challenges faced by three of the most determined eclipse chasers who participated in this adventure. James Craig Watson, in his day a renowned asteroid hunter; Vassar astronomer Maria Mitchell, who fought to demonstrate that science and higher learning were not anathema to femininity; and Thomas Edison, a young inventor and irrepressible...