A "riveting real-life Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" ( The Telegraph ), told "with an engaging voice, a diverting sense of humor, and a humble awe for the wonders of the universe" ( Wall Street Journal ), shows why so much of astronomy comes down to looking up and lucking out. If you learn about the scientific method, you learn that first we hypothesize about something we've experienced, and then we look for more of it. This works well enough--but what if you are interested in studying a heretofore unknown comet or supernova? That is the essential problem of the astronomer: the most important discoveries happen without notice! 

Uploaded March 2025

In Waves in an Impossible Sea , physicist Matt Strassler tells a startling tale of elementary particles, human experience, and empty space. He begins with a simple mystery of motion. When we drive at highway speeds with the windows down, the wind beats against our faces. Yet our planet hurtles through the cosmos at 150 miles per second, and we feel nothing of it. How can our voyage be so tranquil when, as Einstein discovered, matter warps space, and space deflects matter?

During recent decades, strong gravitational lensing has become a powerful tool to study astronomical objects with widely different physical scales. It has also proven to be a promising diagnostic that can solve outstanding problems in cosmology.

Written for an audience of practical engineers instead of theoretical physicists, it exposes the underlying contradictions brought about by the emergence of electromagnetic theory, one of the greatest triumphs in mathematical physics of all time that unified the phenomena of electricity, magnetism, and light, into a world in which the classical Galilean principle of relativity was considered incontrovertible.

These Transactions provide a record of the organizational and administrative activities of the IAU XXX General Assembly, which took place in Vienna, Austria, in August 2018. They report and record all of the essential decisions taken by the governing body of the IAU.

With an opinionated and irreverent tone, the author debunks most of the current theories in the field of modern physics, appealing to the scientific method and common sense. At the same time, in strict compliance with the already known experimental evidence, he proposes his own version of the facts, aimed at rationalizing and unifying the various aspects in which the nature that surrounds us manifests itself.

This symposium honors the contributions of Charlotte Moore Sitterly as a pioneer of spectroscopy, and astronomical spectroscopy in particular.

Two questions guide this seven-year project: First, how can we approach the phenomenon, representation, and interpretation of total solar eclipses? Second, how can we heal the historical divide separating the natural sciences from the humanities, arts, history, and theology?

In The First Atomic Bomb Janet Farrell Brodie explores the history of the Trinity test and those whose contributions have rarely, if ever, been discussed--the men and women who constructed, served, and witnessed the first test--as well as the downwinders who suffered the consequences of the radiation.

Wolverton probes the forever elusive question, still unanswered today, about where cosmic rays come from and what they reveal about black holes, distant galaxies, the existence of dark matter and dark energy, and the birth of the universe, concluding that these splinters of infinity may not hold the keys to the secret of creation but do bring us ever closer to it.