Dava Sobel

Neil Armstrong

Describes the forty-year effort of John Harrison to invent the chronometer, the first instrument able to keep accurate time for navigational purposes.

The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

Longitude

The little-known true story of the unexpected and remarkable contributions to astronomy made by a group of women working in the Harvard College Observatory from the late 1800s through the mid-1900s--Provided by publisher.

How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars

The Glass Universe

Traces the story of the reclusive sixteenth-century cleric who introduced the revolutionary idea that the Earth orbits the sun, describing the dangerous forces and complicated personalities that marked the publication of Copernicus's findings.

How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos

A More Perfect Heaven

How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science

Elements of Marie Curie

Em 1514, um clérigo recluso chamado Nicolau Copérnico desenvolveu o esboço de sua teoria heliocêntrica, a qual desafiava o senso comum e as crenças da época colocando o Sol, e não a Terra, no centro do Universo. Não mais um objeto estático, a Terra agora girava em torno do Sol ao lado de outros planetas. Ao longo das duas décadas seguintes, Copérnico expandiu sua teoria e a compilou num manuscrito secreto, que deixou perplexos os matemáticos e cientistas da época. Com medo de ser ridicularizado, ele se recusava a publicar o livro. Em 1539, um jovem matemático alemão chamado Georg Joachim Rheticus, atraído pelos rumores de uma revolução tão grande quanto a Reforma de Lutero, viaja à Polônia para procurar Copérnico. Dois anos depois, o jovem protestante se despede de seu mentor católico e prepara a obra do mestre para publicação. O resultado é De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, ou As revoluções dos orbes celestes, o livro de 1543 que para sempre transformou o lugar do homem no Universo. No estilo elegante e envolvente que os leitores de Dava Sobel conhecem, a escritora descreve as personalidades conflitantes e as descobertas extraordinárias que moldaram a revolução de Copérnico. Mais que isso, ela insere essas vidas no contexto do século XVI, uma época de transformações radicais em que os conflitos com as velhas formas de pensar estavam na ordem do dia. Ao centro do livro, uma peça teatral imagina a luta de Rheticus para convencer o mestre a finalmente divulgar seus escritos. Assim como nos best-sellers Longitude e A filha de Galileu, Sobel nos dá um inesquecível retrato dos avanços da ciência, bem como um histórico do longo e ainda atual embate entre razão e fé.

Um céu mais perfeito

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Dava Sobel, the "inspiring" (People), little-known true story of women's landmark contributions to astronomy A New York Times Book Review Notable Book Named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Economist, Smithsonian, Nature, and NPR's Science Friday Nominated for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award "A joy to read.” —The Wall Street Journal In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or “human computers,” to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. At the outset this group included the wives, sisters, and daughters of the resident astronomers, but soon the female corps included graduates of the new women's colleges—Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned from computation to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates. The “glass universe” of half a million plates that Harvard amassed over the ensuing decades—through the generous support of Mrs. Anna Palmer Draper, the widow of a pioneer in stellar photography—enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what stars were made of, divided the stars into meaningful categories for further research, and found a way to measure distances across space by starlight. Their ranks included Williamina Fleming, a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid who went on to identify ten novae and more than three hundred variable stars; Annie Jump Cannon, who designed a stellar classification system that was adopted by astronomers the world over and is still in use; and Dr. Cecilia Helena Payne, who in 1956 became the first ever woman professor of astronomy at Harvard—and Harvard’s first female department chair. Elegantly written and enriched by excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs, The Glass Universe is the hidden history of the women whose contributions to the burgeoning field of astronomy forever changed our understanding of the stars and our place in the universe.

Presents a biography of the scientist through the surviving letters of his illegitimate daughter Maria Celeste, who wrote him from the Florence convent where she lived from the age of thirteen.

A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love

Galileo's Daughter

William J.H. Andrewes

A fully illustrated edition of the international best-seller Longitude. The Illustrated Longitude recounts in words and images the epic quest to solve the greatest scientific problem of the eighteenth and three prior centuries: determining how a captain could pinpoint his ship's location at sea. All too often throughout the ages of exploration, voyages ended in disaster when crew and cargo were either lost at sea or destroyed upon the rocks of an unexpected landfall. Thousands of lives and the fortunes of nations hung on a resolution to the longitude problem. To encourage a solution, governments established prizes for anyone whose method or device proved successful. The largest reward of £20,000-- truly a king's ransom-- was offered by Britain's Parliament in 1714. The scientific establishment-- from Galileo to Sir Isaac Newton-- had been certain that a celestial answer would be found and invested untold effort in this pursuit. By contrast, John Harrison imagined and built the unimaginable: a clock that told perfect time at sea, known today as the chronometer. Harrison's trials and tribulations during his forty-year quest to win the prize are the culmination of this remarkable story. The Illustrated Longitude brings a new and important dimension to Dava Sobel's celebrated story. It contains the entire original narrative of Longitude, redesigned to accompany 183 images chosen by William Andrewes-- from portraints of every important figure in the story to maps and diagrams, scientifc instruments, and John Harrison's remarkable sea clocks themselves. Andrewes's elegant captions and sidebars on scientific and historical events tell their own story of longitude, paralleling and illuminating Sobel's memorable tale.

The Illustrated Longitude

With her debut play, the acclaimed author of Longitude, Galileo's Daughter, and A More Perfect Heaven celebrates one of the greatest moments in the history of science.

And the Sun Stood Still

Jennifer Kahn's "Stripped for Parts" was selected as the lead story of this year's Best American Science Writing because, as Dava Sobel, best-selling author of Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, reveals, "it begins with one of the most arresting openings I have ever read." In "Columbia's Last Flight," William Langewiesche recounts the February 1, 2003, space shuttle tragedy, along with the investigation into the nationwide complacency that brought the ship down. K. C. Cole's "Fun with Physics" is a profile of astrophysicist Janet Conrad that blends her personal life with professional activity. In "Desperate Measures," the doctor and writer Atul Gawande profiles the surgeon Francis Daniels Moore, whose experiments in the 1940s and '50s pushed medicine harder and farther than almost anyone had contemplated. Also included is a poem by the legendary John Updike, "Mars as Bright as Venus." The collection ends with Diane Ackerman's "ebullient" essay "We Are All a Part of Nature." Together these twenty-three articles on a wide range of today's most current topics in science -- from biology, physics, biotechnology, and astronomy, to anthropology, genetics, evolutionary theory, and cognition‚ represent the full spectrum of scientific writing from America's most prominent science authors, proving once again that "good science writing is evidently plentiful" (Scientific American).

The Best American Science Writing 2004

After the huge national and international success of ‘Longitude’ and ‘Gallileo’s Daughter’, Dava Sobel tells the human story of the nine planets of our solar system.

The Planets

From the international best-selling author of Longitude, Galileo’s Daughter is the fascinating story of the relationship between the great Italian scientist Galileo and his daughter, Virginia.

Galileo’s Daughter: A Drama of Science, Faith and Love

Inspired by a long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable surviving letters of Galileo's daughter, a cloistered nun, Dava Sobel has written a biography unlike any other of the man Albert Einstein called "the father of modern physics- indeed of modern science altogether." Galileo's Daughter also presents a stunning portrait of a person hitherto lost to history, described by her father as "a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me." Galileo's Daughter dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishment of a mythic figure whose seventeenth-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion. Moving between Galileo's grand public life and Maria Celeste's sequestered world, Sobel illuminates the Florence of the Medicis and the papal court in Rome during the pivotal era when humanity's perception of its place in the cosmos was about to be overturned. In that same time, while the bubonic plague wreaked its terrible devastation and the Thirty Years' War tipped fortunes across Europe, one man sought to reconcile the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic with the heavens he revealed through his telescope. With all the human drama and scientific adventure that distinguished Dava Sobel's previous book Longitude, Galileo's Daughter is an unforgettable story

A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love

After the huge national and international success of LONGITUDE and GALILEO_S DAUGHTER, Dava Sobel tells the human story of the nine planets of our solar system.

Dava Sobel isi pune la lucru marele talent de a tese concepte stiintifice complicate in urzeala unei povesti captivante. Volumul Planetele dezvaluie trasaturi secrete enigme si legende despre planetele din Sistemul Solar. Fie ca ajunge dincolo de invelisul de nori acizi ai lui Venus fie ca isi evoca experienta personala legata de praful lunar aceasta naratiune cu accente intime emana fascinatie frumusete si surpriza. Scrisa cu gratia tipica autoarei care a semnat atâtea bestselleruri cartea este un omagiu original adus Sistemului Solar oferind o perspectiva aparte asupra locului nostru in univers. "

Planetele - Editura Nemira

A mediados del siglo XIX, el Observatorio de Harvard comenzó a emplear a mujeres como calculadoras o "computadoras humanas" para interpretar las observaciones que sus contrapartes masculinas realizaban por telescopio cada noche. Al principio este grupo incluía a las esposas, hermanas e hijas de los astrónomos residentes, pero pronto incluyó a graduadas de las nuevas universidades de mujeres Vassar, Wellesley y Smith. A medida que la fotografía transformaba la práctica de la astronomía, las damas pasaban de la computación a estudiar las estrellas capturadas en placas fotográficas de vidrio. El universo de cristal del medio millón de placas que Harvard acumuló durante las décadas siguientes permitió a las mujeres hacer descubrimientos extraordinarios: ayudaron a identificar de qué estaban hechas las estrellas, las dividieron en categorías significativas y encontraron una manera de medir distancias en el espacio por la luz que emiten. Entre estas mujeres destacaban Williamina Fleming, una escocesa contratada originalmente como criada que identificó diez novas y más de trescientas estrellas variables; Annie Jump Cannon, que diseñó un sistema de clasificación estelar adoptado por los astrónomos de todo el mundo y que sigue vigente; y la doctora Cecilia Helena Payne, que en 1956 se convirtió en la primera profesora titular de astronomía, y la primera mujer jefa de departamento de Harvard.

Martin J. Dougherty

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