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Post by clarencebunsen on Feb 10, 2012 13:10:13 GMT -5
A Universe from Nothing: Einstein, the Belgian Priest and the Puzzle of the Big BangAn excerpt from physicist Lawrence M. Krauss's new book explains why we are not the center of the universe www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=universe-from-nothingRather than reproducing an excerpt from an exerpt I'll just post the link. I have not yet read the book but it looks like a general readership (non math) treatment of 20th century physics.
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Post by dgriffin on Feb 10, 2012 21:09:02 GMT -5
Thanks for that! Great book and I think I'll order it. I was never all that interested in astronomy until 1984 or so when I happened across Clyde Tombaugh's book, "Out of Darkness." After that I think I read every book on astronomy available in our town library. Tombaugh was the discoverer of Pluto and he was also a farm boy who built telescopes in his father's barn and traveled to Percy Lowell's observatory in Arizona and without any academic credentials got a job running a blink comparator, the device they used to search for comets and new stars. (It flipped between two negatives of the same piece of sky taken on different dates. Anything new in the firmament would blink back at you.) Tombaugh was actually looking for Lowell's predicted Planet X, supposed to be somewhere out beyond Neptune and based on calculations of irregular motions of the solar system's planets.
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