Venus in Transit

Eli Maor

195 pages, parution le 30/03/2004

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Résumé

On June 8, 2004, Venus will cross the sun's face for the first time since 1882. Eli Maor tells the intriguing tale of the five Venus transits previously observed and the fantastic efforts made to record them. This is a story of heroes and cowards, of reputations earned and squandered, all told against a backdrop of phenomenal geopolitical and scientific change.

With a novelist's talent for the details that keep readers reading late, Maor tells the stories of how Kepler's misguided theology led him to the laws of planetary motion; of obscure Jeremiah Horrocks, who predicted the 1639 transit only to die, at age 22, a day before he was to discuss the event with the only other human known to have seen it; of the unfortunate Le Gentil, whose decade of labor was rewarded with obscuring clouds, shipwreck, and the plundering of his estate by relatives who prematurely declared him dead; of David Rittenhouse, Father of American Astronomy, who was overcome by the 1769 transit's onset and failed to record its beginning; and of Maximilian Hell, whose good name long suffered from the perusal of his transit notes by a color-blind critic.

Moving beyond individual fates, Maor chronicles how governments' participation in the first international scientific effort--the observation of the 1761 transit from seventy stations, yielding a surprisingly accurate calculation of the astronomical unit using Edmund Halley's posthumous directions--intersected with the Seven Years' War, British South Seas expansion, and growing American scientific prominence. Throughout, Maor guides readers to the upcoming Venus transits in 2004 and 2012, opportunities to witness a phenomenon seen by no living person and not to be repeated until 2117

L'auteur - Eli Maor

Eli Maor teaches the history of mathematics at Loyola University in Chicago. He has published extensively in journals of mathematics and mathematics education and is the author of To Infinity and Beyond , e: The Story of a Number, and June 8, 2004--Venus in Transit (all Princeton).

Sommaire

The Dreamer
Dawn of a New Cosmology
A Sight Never Seen Before
Venus Stripped Bare
Solar and Stellar Parallax
The Dance of Two Planets
A Call tor Action
Venus Returns
A Second Chance
The Next Two Appointments
Transits of Fancy
A View from Other Worlds
June 8, 2004
Appendixes

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Caractéristiques techniques

	PAPIER
Éditeur(s)	Princeton University Press
Auteur(s)	Eli Maor
Parution	30/03/2004
Nb. de pages	195
Format	14 x 21,5
Couverture	Broché
Poids	275g
Intérieur	Noir et Blanc
EAN13	9780691115894
ISBN13	978-0-691-11589-4