The Book of the Cosmos

Imagining the Universe from Heraclitus to Hawking

edited by Dennis Richard Danielson

To put it informally, this book presents my choice of western cosmology's greatest hits from ancient times to the present; and it provides, I hope, a sweeping, accessible, and lively telling of that story in firsthand writings. On the premise that cosmology is an art as well as a science, I have collected not only colorful gems of scientific prose but also brilliant excerpts from poetry and philosophy, diaries and dialogues, essays and epistles. The Book of the Cosmos can be used as a source book. Or it can be enjoyed as a surprisingly coherent narrative--of cosmic passion, awe, intellectual flair, and not-infrequent bewilderment--richly woven by a hundred cosmologists across history whom we hear speaking in their own voices.