![]() With this technique, astronomy entered a new phase. His son John started recording celestial pictures in the newly invented medium: photography. Herschel came up with a rough size of the Milky Way. Singh writes how William Herschel used the telescope to discover the distant planets and their satellites. The book continues with how Newton stood on the shoulders of giants and built on the planetary model to explain gravity. Singh mentions how Galileo could uniquely maintain religious beliefs and scientific dogmas in his mind at the same time, without any conflicts. Next comes Galileo’s experiments with pendulums, falling bodies, his observation of planets with the newly invented telescope, and his ultimate friction with the Church. ![]() Kepler who was myopic and suffered multiple visions from birth interpreted Tyco’s experimental data correctly. ![]() Moving to the middle ages, the story of Tyco Brahe who took observational astronomy to an entirely new level of accuracy. A well articulated story starting from the ancient Greeks to the modern Nobel prize winners in which he describes in detail the Greek’s assumptionsof a round and spinning earth, and their measurements of Earth’s circumference (Eratosthenes), relative sizes of moon and earth (Anaxagoras), and the distance to Sun (Aristarchus). This is by far the best book from Simon Singh. Big Bang is a very comprehensive summary of the physical sciences, leading to astronomy and eventually to cosmology. ![]()
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