Recommendations from our site
“This book covers a lot of ground. It’s about early 20th-century astronomy, mostly in America, and Edwin Hubble and how he discovered the expanding universe. She also traces everything leading up to that discovery….The thing that I like about this book is that she really humanizes all the scientists, and the research too. By doing that, she provides a fascinating insight into how the scientific process works. She shows how pioneering it all was at the time, because they just had basic tools. They had telescopes and spectrographs, but nowhere near what we have now. The fact that they were able to gather so much information and come to all these conclusions is a fascinating story…When you read a book sometimes, you think, ‘Wow, this is so good. I wish I’d written it.’ I had that feeling with this book.” Read more...
The best books on The History of Physics
Mark Wolverton, Science Writer
Our most recommended books
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Faith, Reason, and the Plague in Seventeenth Century Tuscany
by Carlo Cippolla -
Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750
by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park -
Afterglow of Creation
by Marcus Chown -
Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton
by Richard S. Westfall -
Middlemarch
by George Eliot -
Einstein on Politics
by David Rowe and Robert Schulmann