Rating: 
Summary: A brief history of cosmology...
Review: Timothy Ferris's book presents us with a very interesting and sweeping account of those events in our history which shaped and modified our understanding of our world, our solar system and the cosmos and our place in this mind boggling expanse of our universe. Of course these developments were made possible by the men of sciences, explorers, inventors and the discoverers whose curiosities and determination led the human race to wonder and understand our world of the very large(cosmology) and the very small(quantum physics).2,400 years back Aristotle thought of the universe as earth-centered and the planets and stars embedded in crystal spheres. This geocentric model of universe by Aristotle/Ptolemy remained unchallenged for almost 2,000 years until Copernicus offered us the more correct heliocentric model which was somewhat flawed in the sense that the planets' orbits were circular and not elliptic and the sun being at THE centre of the whole universe. Later on it was corrected by Kepler (greatly helped by Tycho Brahe's observational data) and proved by Galileo through his telescope. This book then takes us to further developments in cosmology - the discovery that there are myriad more galaxies in our universe than just our Milky Way as previously understood, the study of the origin of our universe i.e. cosmogony, the expanding universe, big bang, inflationary universe, astrophysics, other stellar objects like nebulae, quasars, pulsars, black holes etc.. Mr. Ferris will also take the readers on a brief tour of relativity theory, quantum theory, standard model/gauge theory and superstrings. The writing style is interesting and easy to understand and meant for general readers as well as cosmology enthusiasts. This is definitely one of the few popular books to deal with the history of sciences especially cosmology. Very enriching!!
| 
