Comets, Cosmology and the Big Bang

Our knowledge of the universe, from the atomic level to the galactic, changed beyond recognition between the sixteenth century and into the twenty-first. In this book Allan Chapman takes up the story from where he left off in Stargazers, tracing the ground-breaking discoveries and developments of the last three centuries. Besides the big names - Halley, the Herschels, Einstein, Hubble, Hoyle, and Lovell - he includes a host of colourful figures, from wealthy telescope-builders to working-men astronomers, to popular astronomical lecturers, along with the many women, from Caroline Herschel to Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who made fundamental discoveries. He also discusses humanity's perennial fascination with aliens and life on other worlds. He then turns to the great observatories of the United States, Jodrell Bank, the 'space race', and the explosion of interest in astronomy that followed Sir Patrick Moore's first appearance on The Sky at Night in 1957.