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Loading... The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaitre, Einstein, and the Birth of Modern Cosmologyby John Farrell
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  bringbackbooks | Jun 16, 2020 |  no reviews | add a review
Sometimes our understanding of our universe is given a huge boost by one insightful thinker. Such a boost came in the first half of the twentieth century, when an obscure Belgian priest put his mind to deciphering the nature of the cosmos. Is the universe evolving to some unforeseen end, or is it static, as the Greeks believed? The debate has preoccupied thinkers from Heraclitus to the author of the Upanishads, from the Mayans to Einstein. The Day Without Yesterday covers the modern history of an evolving universe, and how Georges Lemaitre convinced a generation of thinkers to embrace the notion of cosmic expansion and the theory that this expansion could be traced backward to the cosmic origins, a starting point for space and time that Lemaitre called "the day without yesterday." Lemaitre's skill with mathematics and the equations of relativity enabled him to think much more broadly about cosmology than anyone else at the time, including Einstein. Lemaitre proposed the expanding model of the universe to Einstein, who rejected it. Had Einstein followed Lemaitre's thinking, he could have predicted the expansion of the universe more than a decade before it was actually discovered. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)520.92Natural sciences and mathematics Astronomy Astronomy Biography And History Astronomer BiographiesLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4)
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Wikipedia in English
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One of the criticisms Randy makes is that this is largely based on secondary sources. In fact there is a huge archive available of Lemaitre's papers etc. and yet I don't believe this book refers to it at all. That is quite incredible. The cover boasts that it is the first biography of Lemaitre when there was already a substantial one available in French referred to occasionally in the course of this book. Although French works are given in the bibliography and referred to in the endnotes, I wonder if Farrell actually speaks/reads French.
Not surprisingly, then, from the historian's point of view, I find this book entirely inadequate.
As a writer, ditto. The book is a complete shambles. Why a publishing house would have published this as it, is beyond me. EMPLOY EDITORS. Everybody. EDITORS. P-leeaasssse.
An hour later...having said that, it is no easy matter, I imagine, to write a biography of somebody in which something highly technical and specialised plays so big a part. Maybe if I read more books of this type I will come around to thinking that as far as presentation goes, the author hasn't done as bad a job as I now feel he has.
And I have to say this: much as it claims otherwise, this is NOT a biography of Lemaitre. It is the story of his physics, that's all. (