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Coming of Age in the Milky Way (1988)

When Timothy Ferris decided to write a history of Cosmology he very nearly ended up with a book the size of the Cosmos itself. But for the final product, the result of twelve years of work, he pared three volumes of material down to a more manageable 500 pages. In so doing he has given us what must surely be one of the best books of popular science ever written.

Science writing, if it is to appeal to us unwashed masses, must achieve two very difficult things : it must render difficult concepts comprehensible to the laymen and it must be exciting enough to hold the reader's interest. Coming of Age... succeeds brilliantly on both grounds. Mr. Ferris tells his story as if it were an adventure tale, the adventure being man's continuing quest to understand the world around him, which has pushed the age of the Earth and the physical boundaries of the Universe back further and further, at the same time that the basic matter that makes up the Universe has been perceived to be smaller and smaller than we first believed. And yet, even as we've come to realize how much more complex things are than we first realized, we've nonetheless made extraordinary progress in understanding them.

Meanwhile, Ferris goes beyond the mere theories and gives us a rich set of portraits of the often odd men who made the discoveries : Tycho Brahe with his lead nose; Newton practicing alchemy; Einstein with his various foibles; etc. Though there must surely be some temptation to demonstrate how remarkable these men's' discoveries were by presenting them in all their complexity, Ferris mercifully presents their ideas in terms that we can usually grasp. If things get a little dicey towards the end of the book, and the theories become increasingly obscure and difficult to understand, perhaps it is because they are so new that they have not been thoroughly tested yet. Perhaps their ugliness is an indicator that they are simply untrue. So many of the great physicists have intuitively believed that when it is finally given to us to understand everything about the universe, the answers will be so simple that we will wonder how we could have missed them for so long.

At any rate, this is a terrific book, filled with the thrill of discovery and the often amusing stories of the discoverers. If you are one of the millions who gave up on Stephen Hawking's book, but want to know what was in it, try this much easier read. It's got all the same info, but it's actually geared towards those of us who may not already know it all.

(Reviewed:09-Jul-01)

Grade: (A)

Websites:

GENERAL :
    -American Scientist : The Magazine of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society
    -NY Times : Science
    -Physics Web
    -Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler
    -LINKS : Physics Links (Hypography Sci-Tech)
    -ESSAY : The Big Bang Theory of Science Books (John Horgan, December 14, 1997, NY Times)
    -ESSAY : Physics and faith: The luminous web (The Christian Century, June 02 1999, Barbara Brown Taylor)
    -ESSAY : Colliding Galaxies and the Fate of the Milky Way (Elan Moritz - 8/3/01)
    -ESSAY : Popular Science Writing Requires Inspiration, Perspiration (A.J.S. Rayl, May 11, 1992 , The Scientist)
    -ESSAY: The Question of Time (Mitchell Stephens, Feed Mag)

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Coming of Age in the Milky Way (1988)

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