Coming of Age in the Milky Way
by Timothy Ferris · 30 Jun 1988 · 661pp · 169,298 words
., moments after delivering a toast in honor of femininity.35 *This disturbing puzzle, known today as Olbers’s paradox after the nineteenth-century German astronomer Wilhelm Olbers, was discovered independently by other astronomers, among them Halley, who lectured on it at a Royal Society meeting in 1721. Newton chaired that meeting, but
Big Bang
by Simon Singh · 1 Jan 2004 · 492pp · 149,259 words
of kilometres away. It became clear that our Milky Way is exceedingly thinly populated. Bessel’s contemporaries praised his measurement. The German physician and astronomer Wilhelm Olbers said that it ‘put our ideas about the universe for the first time on a sound basis’. Similarly, John Herschel, William Herschel’s son and
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in the context of the Big Bang model. For example, in 1823, when scientists assumed that the universe was infinite and eternal, the German astronomer Wilhelm Olbers wondered why the night sky was not ablaze with starlight. He reasoned that an infinite universe would contain an infinite number of stars, and if
Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics
by Jim Al-Khalili · 22 Oct 2012 · 208pp · 70,860 words
aware of this paradox, it is somewhat surprising that it was as recently as the 1950S that it was attributed to, and named after, Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, a nineteenth-century physician and amateur astronomer from Bremen in Germany. In fact, few astronomers even seemed interested in it until then. In 1952 the
First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time
by Emma Chapman · 23 Feb 2021 · 265pp · 79,944 words
that the Universe was infinitely old and infinitely large, as they had no evidence to the contrary. Olbers’ paradox (named after the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers) states that if the Universe is infinitely old and unmoving then every direction you look in should land on a star. The problem captured the
Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone
by Juli Berwald · 14 May 2017 · 397pp · 113,304 words
not had time to look at, but which I see in Table of Contents includes a full history of subject and much else besides.” Indeed, Wilhelm Olbers Focke’s book did contain much else. It summarized Mendel’s results on pages 108–111. But fate placed a fold of paper in the
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, 46, 128–29, 154, 199, 251, 254–55, 265. See also specific cities and regions Flotation. See Buoyancy Fluorescence, 115–18 Foça (Turkey), 76 Focke, Wilhelm Olbers, 143–45 Fossil fuels, 8, 15, 24, 161, 170, 178–79, 285 France, 253, 299 Friday Harbor Labs, 111 Frogfish, 226 Fukuoka (Japan), 201, 202
A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson · 5 May 2003 · 654pp · 204,260 words
in the Encyclopaedia Britannica—then a more leading record of scientific thought than now—and was cited repeatedly in an important paper by the German Wilhelm Olbers Focke. Indeed, it was because Mendel's ideas never entirely sank below the waterline of scientific thought that they were so easily recovered when the