The History of Astronomy

A Very Short Introduction

By: Michael Hoskin

Narrated by: Marc Vietor

This is a fascinating introduction to the history of Western astronomy, from prehistoric times to the origins of astrophysics in the mid-19th century. Historical records are first found in Babylon and Egypt, and after two millennia the arithmetical astronomy of the Babylonians merged with the Greek geometrical approach to culminate in the Almagest of Ptolemy. This legacy was transmitted to the Latin West via Islam and led to Copernicus's claim that the Earth is in motion. In justifying this Kepler converted astronomy into a branch of dynamics, leading to Newton's universal law of gravity. The book concludes with 18th- and 19th-century applications of Newton's law and the first explorations of the universe of stars.

©2003 Michael Hoskin (P)2021 Tantor

VSI # 88

A nice survey of Astronomy. Nothing exceptional and mostly covered topics I've spent time on elsewhere, but it does a good job of pulling the various actors (Kepler, Copernicus, Newton, etc) together into one clean, well-measured thread.

Basic introduction, well done

The organization of the book was good, making it easy to understand the concepts. Not just charting scientific progress, the author also documented mistaken conceptions of the universe.