John R. Gribbin is a British science writer, an astrophysicist, and a visiting fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex. His writings include quantum physics, human evolution, climate change, global warming, the origins of the universe, and biographies of famous scientists. He also writes science fiction.
The author, John Gibbons, holds a PhD in Astrophysics, and he is careful to stay close to the facts. He combines observational data with analysis from the known laws of physics, then provides an interpretation that is well supported. All of this makes him be very credible.
From its beginning to the current time, the development of the universe was described in good detail. Enough detail to show what happened, but not so much detail that the story gets totally lost in the equations. He put together the evidence as we know it, then described the sequence of events that led to the formation of matter, and the gradual evolution of galaxies.
He went on to investigate the likely methods by which black holes were created, and showed that despite their prominence at the center of galaxies, they appear to have a minimal effect on the stars in their immediate vicinity. Also, black holes themselves will probably come apart as the universe reaches the end of its course.
Much speculation is inherent to anything projected far into the future. The author states this clearly, and acknowledges that the gravitational constant may not be constant at all; this is a major factor concerning anything we can say about our understanding of the universe. And Cold Dark Matter: This dominates the material we know by a factor of 6 to 1. In other words, we are basing all our information on data which knows about CDM only because it influences gravitational forces, but we cannot say anything more about it.
I liked this book. It answered many questions I had (and still have), did so supported with a solid base, and identified things we think we do know, with a look into some possibilities that may turn out to be factual as we gain a better understanding.
I also like the Oxford series of Very Short Introductions. The library at the community college acquired this collection recently, and I suspect I will read many of these.
"? ??? ????? ??????? ??????? ???????." This ayah kept playing in my head. Astronomy is so important. We owe it to ourselves and our planet to know more. The universe is large, way larger than whatever we have in mind and its constantly changing so we better keep up. Richard Feynmann has once said: "I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe." <3
I expected a lot more information about stars and star formation in this book, though I suppose that would be something covered under a book about stars instead of galaxies as a whole. At the very least, I figured there would be some discussion around different galaxies, how they formed, things like that. There are brief mentions of different types of galaxies, but beyond that a lot of this book is just math/physics and how as science gets better over time we can better gauge distance and the age of various stars/galaxies, and how black holes and dark matter contribute to the makeup of galaxies. It felt like there was very little about galaxies from a name/details side of things.
is quite possibly one of the most important historical figures you've never heard of. Though humans have been looking at the Milky-Way (or Galaxy, from the Greek word for milk) since time immemorial, in the eighteenth century he became the first person to build a telescope powerful enough to resolve the individual stars in it, and so the first to realise that it was composed of stars. He then realised that this meant that the solar system was part of a flattened disc of stars, and that the thinness of the strip in one direction meant that the Sun is not even central. Copernicus had de-centred the Earth, and put the Sun at the centre of the universe; Wright went even further, and de-centred the Sun, putting another brick in the edifice of what astronomers half-jokingly call 'the principle of terrestrial mediocrity'.
Wright went even further than this though, and speculated that certain nebulae might lie outside the Galaxy. Immanuel Kant, of all people, was the first person to speculate that they might be galaxies in their own right. But this was not demonstrated beyond the doubt of many astronomers until as late as 1923, by (who else?) Edwin Hubble.
All these things, and more, are to be learnt in this splendid little book.
Chapter 1: The Great Debate Chapter 2: Stepping stones to the Universe Chapter 3: Our island Chapter 4: Interlude: galactic mediocrity Chapter 5: The expanding universe Chapter 6: The material world Chapter 7: The origin of galaxies Chapter 8: The fate of galaxies
I read this book for my Galaxies Quest class. This book ( and the class) have blown my mind! Not an easy book for me to read; lots of physics. Fascinating subject; I’m so glad that I read this book even though I didn’t always understand it. I plan to reread this book in the future in an effort to hopefully understand more of it.
Clearly God did not wish for me to ever become an astronomist. I understood about five percent of this book. Would have had more fun floating around in space, waiting for the Andromeda Collision for however many millions or billions of years it is expected to take. Really, the only thing of value I got from this book - this is personal, of course; I'm sure Gribbin has done a fine job for anyone with more than a layman's interest - was the overwhelming sense of awe when you consider the vastness, the age, and the mystery of our Universe. Whatever your beliefs are about how it all came to be, it's impossible not to almost shudder at the immensity of the Cosmos.
A week from now, I probably won't remember any of the crazy-talk-physics I just read, but it was fun reading it. There's something comforting about thinking of objects that are so far away in both space and time. It may seem strange to find black holes and quasars and star nursery nebulae comforting but that's just how I roll.