In the year 921/2, the Jewish leaders of Palestine and Babylonia disagreed on how to calculate the calendar. This led the Jews of the entire Near East to celebrate Passover and the other festivals, through two years, on different dates. The controversy was major, but it became forgotten until its late 19th-century rediscovery in the Cairo Genizah. Faulty editions of the texts, in the following decades, led to much misunderstanding about the nature, leadership, and aftermath of the controversy. In this book, Sacha Stern re-edits the texts completely, discovers many new Genizah sources, and challenges the historical consensus. This book sheds light on early medieval Rabbanite leadership and controversies, and on the processes that eventually led to the standardization of the medieval Jewish calendar.

Cosmology is the study of the origin, size, and evolution of the entire universe. Every culture has developed a cosmology, whether it be based on religious, philosophical, or scientific principles. In this book, the evolution of the scientific understanding of the Universe in Western tradition is traced from the early Greek philosophers to the most modern 21st century view. After a brief introduction to the concept of the scientific method, the first part of the book describes the way in which detailed observations of the Universe, first with the naked eye and later with increasingly complex modern instruments, ultimately led to the development of the "Big Bang" theory. The second part of the book traces the evolution of the Big Bang including the very recent observation that the expansion of the Universe is itself accelerating with time.

Astro4U: An Introduction to the Science of the Cosmos is designed to excite students about the grandeur of astronomy and how the universe functions. The book has a fresh, casual, student-friendly tone that dramatically increases interest in the material while also making it more accessible. The book provides a college-level description of science, with astronomy serving as the vehicle of delivery for displaying the scientific model. The content follows a traditional progression, beginning with a study of the sky, followed by discussions of ancient and medieval astronomy, modern scientific practices, and key physical principles. Chapters move through the solar system, stars, then galaxies and the cosmos as a whole, and culminating with exoplanets and the search for life in the universe. The third edition includes new content that reflects the vast number of contemporary discoveries that have changed our understanding of the cosmos. Expanded topics include the first black hole image ever taken and what we've learned about black holes as a result, the great dimming of Betelgeuse, interstellar asteroids, and gravitational waves. Astro4U is written for general education survey courses in astronomy that are geared toward non-science and science majors alike.

In On Both Sides of the Strait of Gibraltar Julio Samso studies the history of medieval astronomy in al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), the Maghrib and the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula. He proves that the Arabic, Latin, Hebrew, Castilian and Catalan sources belong to the same tradition whose origin can be dated in the 11th century due to the changes in Ptolemy's astronomical theory introduced by the Toledan astronomer Ibn al-Zarqalluh/Azarquiel. The book also analyses the role of al-Andalus and the Iberian Peninsula in the transmission of Islamic astronomy to Europe and justifies the fact that Eastern Islamic works published after ca. 950 CE were not accessible to medieval European scholars because they had not reached al-Andalus.

Visual Astronomy introduces the basics of observational astronomy, a fundamentally limitless opportunity to learn about the universe with your unaided eyes or with tools such as binoculars, telescopes, or cameras.

A glass is disordered material like a viscous liquid and behaves mechanically like a solid. A glass is normally formed by supercooling the viscous liquid fast enough to avoid crystallization, and the liquid-glass transition occurs in diverse manners depending on the materials, their history, and the supercooling processes, among other factors. The glass transition in colloids, molecular systems, and polymers is studied worldwide. This book presents a unified theory of the liquid-glass transition on the basis of the two band model from statistical quantum field theory associated with the temperature Green's function method. It is firmly original in its approach and will be of interest to researchers and students specializing in the glass transition across the physical sciences.

This book argues that while the historiography of the development of scientific ideas has for some time acknowledged the important influences of socio-cultural and material contexts, the significant impact of traumatic events, life threatening illnesses and other psychotropic stimuli on the development of scientific thought may not have been fully recognised. Howard Carlton examines the available primary sources which provide insight into the lives of a number of nineteenth-century astronomers, theologians and physicists to study the complex interactions within their 'biocultural' brain-body systems which drove parallel changes of perspective in theology, metaphysics, and cosmology. In doing so, he also explores three topics of great scientific interest during this period: the question of the possible existence of life on other planets; the deployment of the nebular hypothesis as a theory of cosmogony; and the religiously charged debates about the ages of the earth and sun. From this body of evidence we gain a greater understanding of the underlying phenomena which actuated intellectual developments in the past and which are still relevant to today's knowledge-making processes.

In a series of illuminating lectures, Joseph A. Seiss presents a clear picture of astronomical occurrences and inspirations to be found in the Biblical New Testament and Gospels. A superbly insightful Bible commentary, this book contains seventeen lectures, each of which focuses upon a specific astronomical occurrence in the New Testament. Events which draw specific influence from the constellations of the stars are charted, with each star sign identified as important to separate events depicted in the scriptures of the gospels. The nativity of Jesus Christ, wherein the Star of Bethlehem appears to the three wise men, is perhaps the most obvious incident of the astronomical. However, Seiss demonstrates that the stars above are richly significant and play a role in many of the most famous tales of the Bible. For example, when Seiss recounts the story of St. Peter's fishing, he compares the sign of Pisces, which was already widely known in the Biblical era.

Structure and Evolution of Single Stars: An introduction is intended for upper-level undergraduates and beginning graduates with a background in physics. Following a brief overview of the background observational material, the basic equations describing the structure and evolution of single stars are derived. The relevant physical processes, which include the equation of state, opacity, nuclear reactions and neutrino losses are then reviewed. Subsequent chapters describe the evolution of low-mass stars from formation to the final white dwarf phase. The final chapter deals with the evolution of massive stars.