Product Description

In 1609, Galileo fitted two lenses inside a cylindrical tube, aimed the tube at the sky, and forever changed the world. Seeing and Believing tells the story, discovery by discovery, of the telescope, one of the few inventions that have revolutionised our view of the universe and how we fit into it. Seeing and Believing focuses on the often larger-than-life figures whose insights and breakthroughs made our cosmological odyssey possible, from Galileo himself to William Herschel, the musician-turned-astronomer who discovered Uranus, to George Ellery Hale, who regularly conversed with an elf yet managed none the less to found both the Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar observatories. But the most fascinating character of all is the telescope itself, which, designed solely to help us determine our place in the scheme of things. Is an evolving metaphor for how we see ourselves. With a storyteller's eye and a reporter's ability to marshal and distil huge amounts of information, Richard Panek has written an engaging and spirited chronicle of the humbling journey that has made humans smaller and the universe infinitely vaster than we ever imagined.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #586759 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Publishers 4th Estate have been cornering the market in fascinating little hardbacks for some while now and Panek's history of the telescope is a more than worthy addition to their list. Much of his story is a familiar one: Dava Sobel's biography of Galileo and his daughter covers the instrument's early history well; John Gribbin's The Birth of Time offers many of the same insights into the latest findings, in particular those from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. But Panek's sympathetic understanding of the cosmological thinking of past ages is quite equal to Sobel's and more terse; and his willingness to suppose our own thinking labours under equal though different preconceptions is reminiscent of Gribbin at his most iconoclastic. "Whenever we couldn't conceive of what's out there", Panek writes, "whenever we couldn't even begin to guess, it wasn't only because we still lacked the technology but it was because we didn't yet understand what the preconceptions might be that were restricting our view."

Without the telescope, the stars would have remained unimportant to our world view and the universe no larger than our own solar system. Now, it seems, the universe detectable through telescopes represents a mere fraction of what's out there: and so an instrument that seemed to promise perfect understanding is now, after all, only one instrument among many, and our trust in it merely one of "the givens that give us away".

Panek's history is remarkable for its economy and focus, its lively treatment of historical figures and especially for its enthusiasm: "once we'd glimpsed the telescope's potential, its purpose has never not been to seek the boundaries of the universe", Panek declares. It's stirring stuff. --Simon Ings

Guardian
'Richard Panek's eye popping book - brief enough to be gobbled at one sitting, rich enough to re-open immediately - is a story of ever-expanding horizons.'

Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams
"This is a gem of a book. Elegant, informative, provocative and beautifully written."

Customer Reviews

The Middle Ages to Hubble Deep Field in one small book!
A small book, beautifully and concisely written, with a new perspective on the telescope and (for the size of the book) a wealth of information on it's discovery, early users and development up to the time the Hubble Telescope aimed at the small dot of space that became the Hubble Deep Field.

I found Dava Sobel's book "Galileo's Daughter" fascinating and reading about Galileo again, from a different author and a different angle, was a pleasure. But this short and enticing book is about far more than Galileo; it looks at the development of the telescope and how this followed and, frequently, preceded other developments throughout history.

From the backdrop of the Middle Ages, the use of glass to correct eyesight and the development of art to represent a three dimensional world to fibre optics and computer manipulation of light, x-ray evidence of black holes and radio waves evidence of planets in other solar systems this is a fascinating book, skillfully written and thoroughly enjoyable.

The fact that the people and discoveries have all been written about elsewhere in other admirable books does nothing to detract from the pleasure of reading this book. It is, as the blurb on the jacket proclaims, "a gem of a book".