Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Astronomy; History / General; Juvenile Nonfiction / Science

    Whether floating in a skiff on the Ganges as the Sun descends behind the funeral pyres of Varanasi, interviewing psychologists in the Norwegian Arctic about the effects of darkness, or watching tomato seedlings in southern Spain being hair-brushed (the better to catch the Sun's rays), Cohen tirelessly pursues his quarry. Drawing on more than seven years of research, he reports from locations in eighteen different countries, including the Novolazarevskaya science station in Antarctica (the coldest place on Earth); the Arizona desert (the sunniest); the Pope's observatory-cum-fortress outside Rome (possible the least accessible); and the crest of Mount Fuji, where--entirely alone--he welcomes the sunrise on the longest day of the year. As he soon discovers, the Sun is present everywhere--in mythology, language, religion, sciences, art, literature, and medicine; in the ocean depths; even atop the Statue of Liberty. Ancient worshippers believed our star was a man with three eyes and four arms, abandoned by his spouse because his brightness made her weary. The early Christians appropriated the halo from sun imagery and saw the cross as an emblem of the Sun and its rays. Galileo was the first to espy blemishes on the solar surface--sunspots--but hid his discoveries for fear of persecution. Einstein helped duplicate the source of the Sun's power to create the atomic bomb; while the "Sun King" Louis XIV, Chairman Mao, Adolf Hitler, and the Japanese emperors all co-opted the Sun to enlarge their authority. Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes declare that even thinking about the solar system took up too much space in his brain, while Richard Wagner had Tristan inveigh against daylight as the enemy of romantic love. Packed with interesting figures (the Sun is responsible for 44 percent of the world's tidal energy, and when aligned with the Moon, as at high tide, makes us all minutely taller); extraordinary myths (in India, just a few years ago, pregnant women were still being kept indoors during an eclipse, for fear their babies would be born blind or with cleft palates); and surprising anecdotes (during the Vietnam War, a large number of mines dropped into Haiphong harbor blew up simultaneously in response to a large solar flare), this splendidly illustrated volume is erudite, informative, and supremely entertaining. It not only explains the star that so inspires us, but shows how complex our relations with it have been--and continue to be.

    

    This new edition continues to offer the most complete technology/new media support package available. That technology/new media package includes: Interactives, Animations, and introducing Connect - online homework and course management.

    The result is a highly entertaining book on Hollywood's extravagant relationship with the past, a celebration of the cinema as an illuminator of the story of mankind. By the author of the bestselling Flashman novels. 200 photos.

    David Peat explains the development and meaning of this Superstring Theory in a thoroughly readable, dramatic manner accessible to lay readers with no knowledge of mathematics. The consequences of the Superstring Theory are nothing less than astonishing.

    It was studied from antiquity to the Renaissance as a way of glimpsing the nature of reality. Geometry is number in space; music is number in time; and comology expresses number in space and time. Number, music, and geometry are metaphysical truths: life across the universe investigates them; they foreshadow the physical sciences.Quadrivium is the first volume to bring together these four subjects in many hundreds of years. Composed of six successful titles in the Wooden Books series-Sacred Geometry, Sacred Number, Harmonograph, The Elements of Music, Platonic & Archimedean Solids, and A Little Book of Coincidence-it makes ancient wisdom and its astonishing interconnectedness accessible to us today.Beautifully produced in six different colors of ink, Quadrivium will appeal to anyone interested in mathematics, music, astronomy, and how the universe works.

    It transcends the years, the standings, and all other distractions. And thanks to the countless remarkable football games between Michigan and Ohio State--and hundreds of thousands of devoted alumni and followers--the rivalry is now an enormous cultural event.

    For thousands of years it has been at the heart of scientific and philosophical inquiry, from the first star catalogues etched into ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets to the metres-wide telescopes constructed in Chile's Atacama Desert today. On a clear night it is hard not to look up and pick out familiar constellations, and to think of the visionary minds who pioneered our understanding of what lies beyond.In this thrilling new guide to our Universe and how it works, Professor of Astrophysics Jo Dunkley reveals how it only becomes more beautiful and exciting the more we discover about it. With warmth and clarity, Dunkley takes us from the very basics - why the Earth orbits the Sun, and how our Moon works - right up to massive, strange phenomena like superclusters, quasars, and the geometry of spacetime. As she does so, Dunkley unfurls the history of humankind's heroic journey to understand the history and structure of the cosmos, revealing the extraordinary, little-known stories of astronomy pioneers including Williamina Fleming, Vera Rubin and Jocelyn Bell Burnell.Illuminating and uplifting, this is your essential guide to the biggest subject of all.

    Now offering a brilliant solution to a question that has challenged archeologists for centuries, The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon is an exciting story of detection as well as a lavishly illustrated & vividly written description of a little-known civilization. In this remarkable volume, Stephanie Dalley, a world expert on ancient Babylonian language, gathers in one place for the first time all the material on this enigmatic wonder. Tracing the history of the Garden, she describes how deciphering an ancient Assyrian text--& comparing it to sculpture in the British Museum--provided the clues that enabled her to pin down where the Garden was positioned (it was not the Babylon we know today) & to describe in detail what it may have looked like. The author also offers a groundbreaking description of the technology behind the Hanging Garden's water supply, highlighting a very early occurrence of the "water-raising screw." Thru her reconstruction of the Garden, Dalley is also able to follow its influence on later garden design. Unscrambling the many legends that have built up around the Garden, including questions about the roles played by Semiramis & Nebuchadnezzar, this intriguing volume shows why this Garden, with its remarkable innovations, deserves its place alongside the Pyramids & the Colossus of Rhodes as one of the most astonishing technical achievements of the ancient world.

    They shared their memories with him and the result is a book packed with nostalgia, statistics, action, revelations—an extraordinary oral history of baseball in the halcyon days beween the two world wars. Babe Ruth, Lefty Grove, Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Dizzy Dean, Jackie Robinson, Lou Gehrig, and many others are brought to life through the recollections of Wes Ferrell, Charlie Gehringer, Elbie Fletcher, Bucky Waters, Billy Herman, Cool Papa Bell, Spud Chandler, Pete Reiser, and a host of others. Those were the days when the grass was real, salaries were modest, Bob Feller was America's most famous seventeen-year-old, and idealism was in full swing. "Baseball builds your pride," said pitcher Wes Ferrell, who played it in order "to be a better guy."

    The book analyzes how differences could affect the plant, animal and human life on planet Earth.

    Around the world, telegraph systems crashed, machines burst into flames, and electric shocks rendered operators unconscious. Compasses and other sensitive instruments reeled as if struck by a massive magnetic fist. For the first time, people began to suspect that the Earth was not isolated from the rest of the universe. However, nobody knew what could have released such strange forces upon the Earth--nobody, that is, except the amateur English astronomer Richard Carrington.In this riveting account, Stuart Clark tells for the first time the full story behind Carrington's observations of a mysterious explosion on the surface of the Sun and how his brilliant insight--that the Sun's magnetism directly influences the Earth--helped to usher in the modern era of astronomy. Clark vividly brings to life the scientists who roundly rejected the significance of Carrington's discovery of solar flares, as well as those who took up his struggle to prove the notion that the Earth could be touched by influences from space. Clark also reveals new details about the sordid scandal that destroyed Carrington's reputation and led him from the highest echelons of science to the very lowest reaches of love, villainy, and revenge. The Sun Kings transports us back to Victorian England, into the very heart of the great nineteenth-century scientific controversy about the Sun's hidden influence over our planet.

    Few episodes in the development of scientific theory show so clearly how the solution to a highly technical problem can alter our basic thought processes and attitudes. Understanding the processes which underlay the Revolution gives us a perspective, in this scientific age, from which to evaluate our own beliefs more intelligently. With a constant keen awareness of the inseparable mixture of its technical, philosophical, and humanistic elements, Thomas S. Kuhn displays the full scope of the Copernican Revolution as simultaneously an episode in the internal development of astronomy, a critical turning point in the evolution of scientific thought, and a crisis in Western man's concept of his relation to the universe and to God.The book begins with a description of the first scientific cosmology developed by the Greeks. Mr. Kuhn thus prepares the way for a continuing analysis of the relation between theory and observation and belief. He describes the many functions--astronomical, scientific, and nonscientific--of the Greek concept of the universe, concentrating especially on the religious implications. He then treats the intellectual, social, and economic developments which nurtured Copernicus' break with traditional astronomy. Although many of these developments, including scholastic criticism of Aristotle's theory of motion and the Renaissance revival of Neoplatonism, lie entirely outside of astronomy, they increased the flexibility of the astronomer's imagination. That new flexibility is apparent in the work of Copernicus, whose De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) is discussed in detail both for its own significance and as a representative scientific innovation.With a final analysis of Copernicus' life work--its reception and its contribution to a new scientific concept of the universe--Mr. Kuhn illuminates both the researches that finally made the heliocentric arrangement work, and the achievements in physics and metaphysics that made the planetary earth an integral part of Newtonian science. These are the developments that once again provided man with a coherent and self-consistent conception of the universe and of his own place in it.This is a book for any reader interested in the evolution of ideas and, in particular, in the curious interplay of hypothesis and experiment which is the essence of modern science. Says James Bryant Conant in his Foreword: "Professor Kuhn's handling of the subject merits attention, for...he points the way to the road which must be followed if science is to be assimilated into the culture of our times."

     Short and stocky, sporting thick glasses prone to fogging, Eddie was nobody’s athletic ideal. Through struggle, sacrifice, even near-starvation—this British plasterer made his dream a reality: competing in the 1988 Olympic Games in Calgary. Here, in his own words, is Eddie’s story—from the schoolboy stunts that developed his physical courage, to the menial labor that paid for training, to the qualifying jumps that had millions around the world glued to their television sets to watch him. Eddie the Eagle is the tale of an ordinary man’s extraordinary journey above and beyond expectations . . . a journey that rocketed this ultimate underdog to an Olympic legend.