Sky in a Bottle

Peter Pesic - Collection History of Science

262 pages, parution le 16/04/2007

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Résumé

Children ask, "Why is the sky blue?" but the question also puzzled Plato, Leonardo, and even Newton, who unlocked so many other secrets. The search for an answer continued for centuries; in 1862 Sir John Herschel listed the color and polarization of sky light as "the two great standing enigmas of meteorology." In Sky in a Bottle, Peter Pesic takes us on a quest to the heart of this mystery, tracing the various attempts of science, history, and art to solve it. He begins with the scholars of the ancient world and continues through the natural philosophers of the Enlightenment, the empiricists of the scientific revolution, and beyond. The cast of characters includes Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Descartes, Euler, Saussure, Goethe, Rayleigh, and Einstein; but the protagonist is the question itself, and the story tells how we have tried to answer it.

Pesic's odyssey introduces us to central ideas of chemistry, optics, and atomic physics. He describes the polarization of light, Rayleigh scattering, and connections between the appearance of the sky and Avogadro's number. He discusses changing representations of the sky in art, from new styles of painting to new pigments that created new colors for paint. He considers what the sky's nighttime brightness might tell us about the size and density of the universe. And Pesic asks another, daring, question: Can we put the sky in a bottle? Can we recreate and understand its blueness here on earth? This puzzle, he says, opens larger perspectives; questions of the color and brightness of the sky touch on secrets of matter and light, the scope of the universe in space and time, the destiny of the earth, and deep human feelings.

L'auteur - Peter Pesic

Peter Pesic is a Tutor and Musician-in-Residence at St. Johns College, Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University.

Sommaire

Out of the Blue
Ultramarine
Peacock Blue
Shades of Blue
The Blue Flower
True Blue
Blue Laws
Blue Riders
Midnight Blue
The Perfect Blue

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Caractéristiques techniques

	PAPIER
Éditeur(s)	The MIT Press
Auteur(s)	Peter Pesic
Collection	History of Science
Parution	16/04/2007
Nb. de pages	262
Format	13,5 x 20,5
Couverture	Broché
Poids	290g
Intérieur	Noir et Blanc
EAN13	9780262662000
ISBN13	978-0-262-66200-0