Synopsis
From mankind's ancestors to Professor Stephen Hawking, James Muirden cleverly and humorously examines our quest to make sense of the cosmos in wonderful rhyming couplets. If you've ever wondered about the universe, or wanted to broaden your horizons, here are the theories, discoveries, writings and sayings of Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoras, Ptolemy, and the Arab astronomers and mathematicians who flourished during Europe's Dark Ages, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Boyle and many more by way of Einstein and so to the present day…and now the education is fun! Here also are the thoughts of space scientists, alchemists, writers, and theologians all weighing in on the cosmos as, through Muirden's delightful presentation, he spins the history of science on a new axis.
Here's a short excerpt from The Cosmic Verses:
Pythagoras thought the world a sphere,
(a new and startling idea!),
but his enduring claim to fame
is through the proof that bears his name.
Draw any triangle that you dare,
one corner being nice and square:
the shorter sides call a and b,
the long hypotenuse call c…
then c2 equals you will find,
the squares of a and b combined.
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About the Author
James Muirden has written some thirty books on astronomy and space, in addition to A Rhyming History of Britain and Shakespeare Well-Versed. He has also been a film reviewer and telescope maker. He lives with his wife and children in Devon, England.
Reviews
This latest volume of didactic verse from the author of A Rhyming History of Britain brings Muirden's knack for the explanatory couplet to the history of astronomy. Using mainly iambic tetrameter—spiked with the occasional limerick and aided by Eccles's charming cartoons—Muirden traces the study of the cosmos from Cro-Magnon times to the present. Even when the science is knotty, readers will marvel at Muirden's ability to rhyme almost anything—including Einstein's general theory of relativity ("But nobody was then prepared/For e to = mc²). Muirden places the science within its historical context; plenty of rhymes address the formidable role the Church played in furthering (or thwarting) the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and if lay readers close this book with a still-incomplete grasp of astronomy, it's likely they'll come away with a better understanding of, say, the Danish court of Tycho Brahe's time or of the intellectual climate in Baghdad in A.D. 762. For uninitiated readers seeking an introduction to astrophysics, there are more comprehensive (nonrhyming) books available. Those with a background in astronomy, however—or those who just wish to appreciate Muirden at the top of his game—will find this delightful. (Jan)
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From English history (A Rhyming History of Britain, 2003) and literature (Shakespeare Well-Versed, 2004) Muirden turns his humorous muse to a far fitter task. He has some 30 books on astronomy and space already on his resume, so one more on the science that subsumes those topics, cosmology, should be a mere bagatelle. And so it is, though like Beethoven's piano bagatelles, weighty as well as light. The weight is inherent to the subject, which Muirden traces from Neolithic cave painters' possible heavy thinking on the stars to the radiation discovered by Stephen Hawking, which, emitted by black holes, is a ponderous product, indeed. The lightness is conferred by Muirden's rattling iambic tetrameter couplets, relieved yet abetted by sidebars of linked limericks, ballad stanzas, and other jigging forms on such matters as epicycles, the punctum equans ("Ptolemy's fix"), Kepler's first two laws, Newton's law of gravity, and the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. And then there are David Eccles' airy cartoon illustrations to keep things positively floating. Ray Olson
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