Summary

The history of human thought on the nature of the Cosmos offers a number of remarkable lessons, the most striking of which is that the architecture of the universe is open to reason. The plan is intricate and subtle, and each glimpse of another layer has led philosophers and scientists to a deeper mental image of the physical world. These images have surprising clarity and coherence--from the view of the Cosmos as geometry by the Greeks to the mechanistic clockwork of the Newtonian universe to the quirky subatomic "dance" of quantum particles and fields to a geometric worldview with a relativistic and quantum twist. Each generation has had members who thought that they had found the path that would penetrate to the centre of innermost truth. The present generation is no different, but is there any real reason to believe that the process has stopped with its conclusions?

Yet, incomplete though it may be, the scope of modern scientific understanding of the Cosmos is truly dazzling. It envisages that four fundamental forces, along with matter-energy and space itself, emerged in a big bang. Forged in the heat of the primeval fireball were the two simplest elements, hydrogen and helium. As the fireball expanded and cooled, the dominance of gravity over matter led to the birth of galaxies and stars. As the stars evolved, hydrogen and helium were molded into the heavy elements, which were subsequently spewed into interstellar space by titanic explosions that occurred with the death of massive stars. The enriched debris mixed with the gas of interstellar clouds, which collected into cool dense pockets and formed new generations of stars. At the outskirts of a spiral galaxy, the gravitational collapse of a rotating molecular cloud core resulted in the formation of the Sun, surrounded by a spinning disk of gas and dust. The dust, composed of the heavy elements produced inside stars, accumulated to form planetary cores of rock and ice. One such planet was fortunate enough to have water in all three phases; and carbon chemistry in the liquid oceans of that planet gave rise to living organisms that evolved and eventually conquered the land. The most intelligent of these land animals looked up at the sky and saw the planets and the stars, and in wonderment pondered the underlying plan of the Cosmos.

Bibliography

General works.

Review articles on a wide variety of modern astronomy and astrophysics topics written for the scientifically literate are found in STEPHEN P. MARAN (ed.), The Astronomy and Astrophysics Encyclopedia (1992). Topical surveys of more limited scope are available in the Harvard Books on Astronomy series, especially such titles as LAWRENCE H. ALLER, Atoms, Stars, and Nebulae, 3rd ed. (1991); BART J. BOK and PRISCILLA F. BOK, The Milky Way, 5th ed. (1981); and WALLACE TUCKER and RICCARDO GIACCONI, The X-Ray Universe (1985). There are many introductory astronomy textbooks available that suppose little mathematical sophistication on the part of the reader; one of the most comprehensive is GEORGE O. ABELL, DAVID MORRISON, and SIDNEY C. WOLFF, Exploration of the Universe, 6th ed. (1991). An introduction that begins with the big bang and works forward in time is DONALD GOLDSMITH, The Evolving Universe, 2nd ed. (1985). At a somewhat more advanced level is FRANK H. SHU, The Physical Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy (1982).

History of astronomy.

The standard reference is A. PANNEKOEK, A History of Astronomy (1961, reissued 1989; originally published in Dutch, 1951). Excellent accounts of early ideas can be found in J.L.E. DREYER, A History of Astronomy from Thales to Kepler, 2nd ed. (1953); and GIORGIO DE SANTILLANA, The Origins of Scientific Thought (1961, reissued 1970). A historical account of our understanding of galaxies and the extragalactic universe is TIMOTHY FERRIS, Coming of Age in the Milky Way (1988). WILLIAM SHEEHAN, Worlds in the Sky (1992), summarizes our current understanding of the solar system.

Planets.

Useful summaries are found in BRUCE MURRAY (ed.), The Planets (1983), a collection of Scientific American articles. Also recommended is J. KELLY BEATTY and ANDREW CHAIKIN (eds.), The New Solar System, 3rd ed. (1990). The relationship of the origin of the solar system to theories of star formation is discussed at a technical level in DAVID C. BLACK and MILDRED SHAPLEY MATTHEWS (eds.), Protostars and Planets II (1985).

Stars and other cosmic components.

A very readable work on stellar evolution is ROBERT JASTROW, Red Giants and White Dwarfs, new ed. (1990). MARTIN COHEN, In Darkness Born: The Story of Star Formation (1988), summarizes the processes of star formation. A classic text is MARTIN SCHWARZSCHILD, Structure and Evolution of the Stars (1958, reissued 1965). Stellar nucleosynthesis is the emphasis of DONALD D. CLAYTON, Principles of Stellar Evolution and Nucleosynthesis (1968, reprinted 1983). STAN WOOSLEY and TOM WEAVER, "The Great Supernova of 1987," Scientific American, 261(2):32-40 (August 1989), is a popular review. The properties of gravitationally compact stellar remnants are discussed by STUART L. SHAPIRO and SAUL A. TEUKOLSKY, Black Holes, White Dwarfs, and Neutron Stars (1983). HARRY L. SHIPMAN, Black Holes, Quasars, and the Universe, 2nd ed. (1980), is a more elementary treatment. MICHAEL W. FRIEDLANDER, Cosmic Rays (1989), is an introduction.

Galaxies.

Beautiful photographs of galaxies together with nontechnical commentary are contained in TIMOTHY FERRIS, Galaxies (1980). Equally enjoyable for the amateur and professional alike are ALLAN SANDAGE, The Hubble Atlas of Galaxies (1961); HALTON ARP, Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies (1966, reprinted 1978); and ALLAN SANDAGE and G.A. TAMMANN, A Revised Shapley-Ames Catalog of Bright Galaxies, 2nd ed. (1987). An observational account of current ideas on the formation of our own galaxy is found in SIDNEY VAN DEN BERGH and JAMES E. HESSER, "How the Milky Way Formed," Scientific American, 268(1):72-78 (January 1993). Extragalactic astronomy is discussed at a level appropriate for professionals in ALLAN SANDAGE, MARY SANDAGE, and JEROME KRISTIAN (eds.), Galaxies and the Universe (1975, reprinted 1982); S.M. FALL and D. LYNDEN-BELL (eds.), The Structure and Evolution of Normal Galaxies (1981); and C. HAZARD and SIMON MITTON (eds.), Active Galactic Nuclei (1979). The problems of galaxy formation or galaxy clustering are described by JOSEPH SILK, The Big Bang, rev. and updated ed. (1989); and by P.J.E. PEEBLES, The Large-Scale Structure of the Universe (1980).

Cosmology.

Several excellent semipopular accounts are available: TIMOTHY FERRIS, The Red Limit: The Search for the Edge of the Universe, 2nd rev. ed. (1983); STEVEN WEINBERG, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe, updated ed. (1988); NIGEL CALDER, Einstein's Universe (1979, reissued 1982); EDWARD R. HARRISON, Cosmology, the Science of the Universe (1981); ROBERT V. WAGONER and DONALD W. GOLDSMITH, Cosmic Horizons (1982); and JOHN BARROW and JOSEPH SILK, The Left Hand of Creation: The Origin and Evolution of the Expanding Universe (1983). MICHAEL ROWAN-ROBINSON, The Cosmological Distance Ladder (1985), provides a detailed discussion of how astronomers measure distances to galaxies and quasars. STEPHEN W. HAWKING, A Brief History of Time (1988), is a discussion by a modern scientific icon on gravitation theory, black holes, and cosmology. Standard textbooks on general relativity and cosmology include P.J.E. PEEBLES, Physical Cosmology (1971); STEVEN WEINBERG, Gravitation and Cosmology (1972); and CHARLES W. MISNER, KIP S. THORNE, and JOHN ARCHIBALD WHEELER, Gravitation (1973). The interface between particle physics and cosmology is the concern of G.W. GIBBONS, STEPHEN W. HAWKING, and S.T.C. SIKLOS (eds.), The Very Early Universe (1983). One of the best semipopular introductions to the modern attempts to unify the fundamental forces is P.C.W. DAVIES, The Forces of Nature, 2nd ed. (1986).

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