Author: Marcia Bartusiak
Plot
The Day We Found the Universe really is about that - the story of how we learned that Planet Earth occupies just one corner of a normal galaxy spinning about in a sea of galaxies...an entirety called the Universe. Which is really big. So big that the early astronomers had an incredibly hard time accepting that there was more than one galaxy to begin with. Actually, what was a galaxy anyway?
From bitterly cold nights at the first mountaintop observatories (which, in the case of the Bay area telescope, afforded an excellent view of the massive fire which destroyed much of San Francisco. One just needed to point the telescope downward) to painstaking work developing and comparing photographic plates, The Day We Found the Universe presents an account of the actual effort and titanic debates which surrounded the discovery that we live in a universe. From famous astronomers like Hubble to lesser known participants who nonetheless greatly shaped the unfolding story, the tale is told, and yet is still being told today.
Brian's Opinion
Superbly done - far from being just a curiosity story describing scientific breakthroughs, Bartusiak delves deeply into who these astronomers were - and they were a rather interesting bunch. I enjoyed that aspect of the story just as much as the story itself. My criteria for a good book is that I would read it again - and I would definitely read The Day we Found the Universe again.
Who might like it
Science history aficionados will enjoy this story, as would anyone curious about just how we know we know what we know about our place in the universe.
Read it!
Amazon Kindle
Amazon Paperback
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