In 2004, Venus crossed the sun's face for the first time since
1882. Some did not bother to step outside. Others planned for
years, reserving tickets to see the transit in its entirety. But
even this group of astronomers and experience seekers were
attracted not by scientific purpose but by the event's beauty,
rarity, and perhaps--after this book--history. For previous
sky-watchers, though, transits afforded the only chance to
determine the all-important astronomical unit: the mean distance
between earth and sun.
Eli Maor tells the intriguing tale of the five Venus transits
previously observed and the fantastic efforts made to record them.
This is a story of heroes and cowards, of reputations earned and
squandered, all told against a backdrop of phenomenal geopolitical
and scientific change.
With a novelist's talent for the details that keep readers
reading late, Maor tells the stories of how Kepler's misguided
theology led him to the laws of planetary motion; of obscure
Jeremiah Horrocks, who predicted the 1639 transit only to die, at
age 22, a day before he was to discuss the event with the only
other human known to have seen it; of the unfortunate Le Gentil,
whose decade of labor was rewarded with obscuring clouds,
shipwreck, and the plundering of his estate by relatives who
prematurely declared him dead; of David Rittenhouse, Father of
American Astronomy, who was overcome by the 1769 transit's onset
and failed to record its beginning; and of Maximilian Hell, whose
good name long suffered from the perusal of his transit notes by a
color-blind critic.
Moving beyond individual fates, Maor chronicles how governments'
participation in the first international scientific effort--the
observation of the 1761 transit from seventy stations, yielding a
surprisingly accurate calculation of the astronomical unit using
Edmund Halley's posthumous directions--intersected with the Seven
Years' War, British South Seas expansion, and growing American
scientific prominence. Throughout, Maor guides readers to the
upcoming Venus transits in 2004 and 2012, opportunities to witness
a phenomenon seen by no living person and not to be repeated until
2117
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