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Seeing and Believing: A Short History of the Telescope and How we Look at the Universe, by Richard Panek

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Amazon.com Review

Journalist Richard Panek begins his historical essay on the telescope with the Hubble Deep Field. This extended exposure by space telescope is a picture that looks out of our galaxy--farther, immeasurably farther, than the human eye has seen before. It exemplifies the purpose of all telescopes: "To address our place in the universe, literally. To size up all of space and figure out where we are in it." How and why did this particular technology have such profound effects? Panek first considers Galileo, who "raised his new instrument toward the night sky and understood at once that there was more to see--and more to seeing--than meets the eye.... Unlike spectacles or magnifying lenses, the optic tube offered not just a distortion of what was already there, but more. It revealed evidence that was different from what the naked eye could see, evidence that wasn't otherwise there." Panek goes on to look at the, ahem, luminaries of observational astronomy--William Herschel, George Ellery Hale, Edwin Hubble--showing how faith in the telescope grew and our mental image of the universe expanded until "all the assumptions safely based on observation are gone." Panek's prose is vivid and beautiful, sustaining this (curiously) unillustrated book as it traces the astronomer's quest for light and dark, sight and belief. --Mary Ellen Curtin

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From Publishers Weekly

Panek's concise, popularly written history of the telescope is an exciting interstellar voyage that shows how a humble novelty item and maritime tool evolved into a powerful exploratory instrument that has changed our conception of the cosmos. Although Galileo's discovery of Jupiter's moons with a spyglass in 1610 helped demolish the medieval worldview that placed a stationary earth at the center of creation, faulty lenses and frustrating optics hobbled astronomical research for decades. Amateur astronomer William Herschel's discovery of Uranus in 1781 led to his pre-Einsteinian insight that stargazers were not only looking tens of trillions of miles into space, but also penetrating into time past. Yet, incredibly, as recently as the turn of this century most astronomers clung to the belief that the universe consisted of just one galaxyAoursAwith the sun in a central position. In 1996, the Hubble Space Telescope pierced the heavens, resulting in the current estimate of a total of 50 billion galaxies. Panek (Waterloo Diamonds), contributing writer at Elle and Mirabella, puts these and other conceptual breakthroughs into clear perspective as he deftly explains how astronomy's interface with photography, spectroscopy, radio and space exploration led to the discovery of quasars, pulsars, black holes, galaxy superclusters and the search for "dark matter." His narrative sometimes bogs down in technical detail, but, nonetheless, it is a delightful intellectual adventure, fleshed out with vivid cameos of innovators like Tycho Brahe, Edwin Hubble and visionary astrophysicist George Ellery Hale, who in 1948 supervised the construction of what was then the world's largest telescope at Mount Palomar, but whose mental illness made him report that he was suffering periodic visits from an elf. Agent, Henry Dunow. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product details

Hardcover: 208 pages

Publisher: Viking Adult (October 1, 1998)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0670876283

ISBN-13: 978-0670876280

Product Dimensions:

4.7 x 0.8 x 7.8 inches

Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

4.4 out of 5 stars

8 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#2,575,952 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

A great read. Highly recommend to anyone into astronomy and the history of the telescope!

I've read a lot of books about telescopes and the history of astronomy so I was somewhat skeptical that this small format text from 1998 would be all that interesting. But it only took a few pages' reading to realize that this book was something special. It is not a bare bones recital of the standard history you read in other books, where other books summarize Galileo and the telescope in a sentence or two and then move on, Panek devotes about a 1/3 of the book to what happened *after* Galileo made his telescope but *before* the next advance in telescope design. What happened was that astronomers changed their whole way of thinking about the universe, starting with convincing themselves that the image in the telescope was actually a reality, and not some distortion of their vision. When refracting telescopes were improved later, astronomers dismissed them because the image was upside down! It was only years later that they realized it didn't matter in astronomy what was up and what was down. I've never read about this in any other books.In addition to an in-depth study of the Galileo period, William Herschel gets a large portion of the book. This is also fascinating and new because most books mention his work (a huge star catalog, discovery of Uranus), but little about the man himself. It's interesting to see here how a musician giving 8 lessons a day becomes the astronomer to the king.Lastly Hale and Hubbard get their due. Again with more insight into Hale than I've gotten out of hour-long documentaries on TV.It helps to have been exposed to some of this material elsewhere, since this book had no illustrations or photos. But it certainly fills in some gaps in history that you will find interesting.

Wow...some of those lights are actually ...other Earths? Galileo and his contemporaries opened up the door for people to confirm what they've read in scripture and to get, for the first time, perspective on *size* and *distance*.Suddenly the moon had a very "lined" countenance and Mars was a different color from the moon. And the starry backdrop begged the question: does intensity of light betray closeness?Hubble is the new "basic" telescope. And we still can only see a tiny spec from which to guess on the size of this mess. If we can say there are an approximate umber of stars in this part of the picture, then what of *the* picture? And are there countless pictures?Read this poetic..but not *easy* book. Just like the early views into space - it requires reflection.

If you've read "Longitude," by Dava Sobel, and liked it, you'll like Panek's book as well. "Longitude" is the story of the invention of a chronometer sufficiently accurate to allow navigation to a desired longitude. It was instrumental in the mapping and exploration of earth. Similarly, "Seeing and Believing" is the story of another important invention, the telescope, which allowed us to map the cosmos and, as the subtitle says, find our place in the universe.The story of the telescope begins with glass. More than 100 years before the invention of the telescope people fashioned glass into lenses that corrected poor eyesight, and found practical applications in such things as reading spectacles. It seems odd, I think, that it took so long for someone conceive of using two lenses in a tube to magnify the appearance of distant objects. [Then again, most things seem trivial in hindsight. Original thought is often underrated, and what we mistake as intelligence is often nothing more than the common man's ability to learn tricks taught by genius.]Most of us have heard of Galileo. He is famous for his use of the telescope, and for his confrontations with the Catholic Church. But Galileo wasn't the inventor of the telescope (though he made significant contributions to the telescope's design). Galileo's genius was in the way he used the telescope to study the heavens, the conclusions he drew from those observations, and how those observations began a scientific and philosophical revolution that emphasized experimentation as the foundation of science.Before the invention of the telescope the idea hadn't yet been hatched that an instrument could bring distant, essentially invisible, objects into clear view. There were initial suspicions that the telescope was just an elaborate hoax; an optical illusion. This suspicion was aided by design flaws in early telescopes that resulted in large optical aberrations, especially near the edges of the lenses. Placing myself in this historical context I find a certain amount of empathy for the skeptics. But it was overdone. Even when the telescope proved its validity through unambiguous verification, by demonstrating the ability to discern distant terrestrial objects, there was still a suspicion that it might view celestial objects with less accuracy. Old ideas die hard.It wasn't just healthy skepticism that resulted in initial criticism of celestial observations with the telescope. These observations were diametrically opposed to the philosophical constructs of the day. What these observations showed us was the picture of a universe that was utterly inconsistent with those favored by the religious and philosophical leaders of the day. Eventually, though, even religion couldn't stop the march of progress. The telescope's utility and its power to challenge belief by seeing (as the old saying goes, seeing is believing) led to a revolution not only in our understanding of the cosmos, but the observational bedrock of modern science itself.A good part of the book takes us up through the story of Galileo, but it doesn't end there. Other astronomers used the telescope to continue to expand our view of the universe. The story has been a rapid one. It wasn't that long ago (within the last century) that scientists weren't sure if the galactic nebula were clouds or groups of stars. Our local galaxy, the Milky Way, was no different. Within the last 100 years the telescope has been at the forefront of a revolution that has expanded the size of the known universe billions of light years and brought into view strange new phenomena like dark matter, black holes, neutron stars, and super novae.Today's modern telescopes are very different, yet much the same, as the one Galileo first peered through. They are monumental instruments of incredible complexity. Optical telescopes are huge behemoths that use compound mirrors with active focusing to compensate for thermal currents in the earth's atmosphere. Other telescopes, like Hubble, look outside the obscuring atmosphere for an uncluttered look at the universe. Still others explore the universe at very long (infrared) wavelengths, microwave wavelengths, and even radio wavelengths. While they do, a new generation of telescopes, like the European Space Agency's (ESA) XMM-Newton X-ray satellite, explores the universe at wavelengths indicative of the most violent activity in the universe.Though different in almost all their mechanical respects, modern telescopes do one thing essentially the same as Galileo's instrument; they open up the universe to our view and explode many of our pre-existing concepts about the universe. And, perhaps most importantly, they guide our quest to understand our place in the universe.This is a small book with a surprising amount of information within its pages. It can be read easily in a week, and it's small enough to carry to the park or library. The book is easy to read, very well written, entertaining and informative. I thoroughly loved it.

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