This work contains short biographies of Galileo, Newton Herschel, Huggins, Hale, Eddington, Shapley and Hubble - eight astronomers who broke with traditions and defined the cosmos as we know it now.

Presents the observations that helped establish our theories of the cosmos, from a unique and engaging perspective.

Galileo, Newton, Herschel, Huggins, Hale, Eddington, Shapley and Hubble: these astronomers applied ideas drawn from physics to astronomy and made dramatic changes to the world-pictures that they inherited. They showed that celestial objects are composed of the same materials as the earth and that they behave in the same way. They displaced successively the earth, the sun and finally the milky way galaxy from being the centre of the universe. This book contains their biographies and outlines their greatest discoveries. Hard work, physical insight, desire for fame and a strong belief in the rightness of their own ideas were characteristics of all eight. Their often quirky personalities led them into bitter controversies with their contemporaries. But their successes arose from the outstanding clarity of their thoughts, their practical ability and their strong sense of direction in science.

The historical and social implications of the telescope and that instrument's modern-day significance are brought into startling focus in this fascinating account. When Galileo looked to the sky with his perspicillum, or spyglass, roughly 400 years ago, he could not have fathomed the amount of change his astonishing findings—a seemingly flat moon magically transformed into a dynamic, crater-filled orb and a large, black sky suddenly held millions of galaxies—would have on civilizations. Reflecting on how Galileo's world compares with contemporary society, this insightful analysis deftly moves from the cutting-edge technology available in 17th-century Europe to the unbelievable phenomena discovered during the last 50 years, documenting important astronomical advances and the effects they have had over the years.

Your household is not just a shelter from a war zone; it is the command center from where you launch your attacks. It's this vision of the world, with the Christian family at the heart, that modern parents desperately need to recover.

In 1957, as Americans obsessed over the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite, another less noticed space-based scientific revolution was taking off. That year, astrophysicists solved a centuries-old quest for the origins of the elements, from carbon to uranium. The answer they found wasn’t on Earth, but in the stars. Their research showed that we are literally stardust. The year also marked the first conference that considered the origin of life on Earth in an astrophysical context. It was the marriage of two of the seemingly strangest bedfellows—astronomy and biology—and a turning point that award-winning science author Jacob Berkowitz calls the Stardust Revolution. In this captivating story of an exciting, deeply personal, new scientific revolution, Berkowitz weaves together the latest research results to reveal a dramatically different view of the twinkling night sky—not as an alien frontier, but as our cosmic birthplace. Reporting from the frontlines of discovery, Berkowitz uniquely captures how stardust scientists are probing the universe’s physical structure, but rather its biological nature. Evolutionary theory is entering the space age. From the amazing discovery of cosmic clouds of life’s chemical building blocks to the dramatic quest for an alien Earth, Berkowitz expertly chronicles the most profound scientific search of our era: to know not just if we are alone, but how we are connected. Like opening a long-hidden box of old family letters and diaries, The Stardust Revolution offers us a new view of where we’ve come from and brings to light our journey from stardust to thinking beings.

Presents a revolutionary new theory that bridges the divide between science and spirituality • Discloses the ramifications of non-localized consciousness and how the physical world and spiritual experience are two aspects of the same reality • Includes contributions from Jane Goodall, Ed Mitchell, Stanislav Grof, Ralph Abraham, and Christian de Quincy, among others What scientists are now finding at the outermost frontiers of every field is overturning all the basic premises concerning the nature of matter and reality. The universe is not a world of separate things and events but is a cosmos that is connected, coherent, and bears a profound resemblance to the visions held in the earliest spiritual traditions in which the physical world and spiritual experience were both aspects of the same reality and man and the universe were one. The findings that justify this new vision of the underlying logic of the universe come from almost all of the empirical sciences: physics, cosmology, the life sciences, and consciousness research. They explain how interactions lead to interconnections that produce instantaneous and multifaceted coherence--what happens to one part also happens to the other parts, and hence to the system as a whole. The sense of sacred oneness experienced by our ancestors that was displaced by the unyielding material presumptions of modern science can be restored, and humanity can once again feel at home in the universe.

We stand at the threshold of a revolutionary and empowering new vision of the world. The discoveries of leading-edge science and the insights of spirituality are converging to reveal that the CosMos and all that we term reality is wholly integrated, and that at its most fundamental level, it is a field of information. This is the elemental cosmic mind from which everything emanates, is manifested, and to which all ultimately returns. Research is also demonstrating what the mystics of all traditions have discerned: that we have the innate ability to envision, understand, and experience the CosMos at levels far beyond the limitations of our human persona. CosMos is co-authored by two explorers who combine almost a century of seeking to understand not only how the world is as it is, but why. Philosopher Ervin Laszlo, Ph. D., and healer and scientist Jude Currivan, Ph. D., offer a revisioned view of the world that is no longer fragmented, but is at last, whole. Theirs is a perception of a meaningful and co-creative world that is exquisitely tuned to be ''as simple as it can be'' for consciousness to explore itself. In these momentous times, the vision shared in Cosmos invites us to open our hearts and minds to re-member who we really are and to take our places as conscious co-creators of our realities and of our evolving cosmic destiny.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From one of the world’s leading physicists and author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Elegant Universe, comes “an astonishing ride” through the universe (The New York Times) that makes us look at reality in a completely different way. Space and time form the very fabric of the cosmos. Yet they remain among the most mysterious of concepts. Is space an entity? Why does time have a direction? Could the universe exist without space and time? Can we travel to the past? Greene has set himself a daunting task: to explain non-intuitive, mathematical concepts like String Theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Inflationary Cosmology with analogies drawn from common experience. From Newton’s unchanging realm in which space and time are absolute, to Einstein’s fluid conception of spacetime, to quantum mechanics’ entangled arena where vastly distant objects can instantaneously coordinate their behavior, Greene takes us all, regardless of our scientific backgrounds, on an irresistible and revelatory journey to the new layers of reality that modern physics has discovered lying just beneath the surface of our everyday world.