Mission: Books 15/25
A Book of Non-Fiction: The Universe in 100 Key Discoveries by Giles Sparrow
This stunning collection of images and essays surveys the key breakthroughs that have shaped our understanding of the universe around us - from the discovery of the solar system, to Supermassive black holes and the remote depths of the cosmos.
Beginning with the theories put forward for the origin of our universe - the Big Bang and its rivals - and ending with what the eventual fate of our cosmos might be, this overview of 100 landmark discoveries tells the story of how we have endeavoured to understand the place of our own planet in the wider universe.
I love space, I've always loved space, and I love this book. For a start it's huge, there are a hundred chapters that all contain amazing colour images of the subject matter. I spent a couple of weeks reading it, because I kept showing people the pictures, and going back to read earlier chapters.
This book really is committed to laying out all the key discoveries made, concerning everything off-planet. From the discovery that the earth goes round the sun, to the speed of light, to the distances and composition of all the planets and their moons. A large portion of the middle of the book takes a trip to all of the bodies in the solar system, from their discovery, to the most recent photos take of them. Including neglected dwarf planets like Ceres, Pallas and Vesta. And Mars's strange, little-touched-upon moons, Phobos and Deimos - before it wanders off to other galaxies, the expanding universe, dark energy and beyond. The chapters vary in depth, sometimes adding a little math here and there, or trusting the reader to follow them using what they've learned so far, in some of the later chapters. It explains the subject, gives you a basic description of how discoveries were made, by whom, and what they meant to science both then and now. Then the chapters build on each other, reference each other, slowly creating a picture of a huge, working universe.
While trusting that you won't get horribly distracted by pictures of nebulas.
I wish I could go into space.