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A review by epollack
The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaître, Einstein, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology by John Farrell
4.0
Well written, and easy to read book.
It may be that no book on astrophysics and cosmology would be simple enough for me but, that said, I hate it when there is a throw-away line and I don't get it - like not understanding the punchline of a joke.
Specifically, Farrell writes (I think misspelling Wilhelm Olbers' name as"Olber") "...if the universe was truly infinite in space and time, why was the sky dark at night?" (p162). Now I'm sure the answer is obvious to most people but not to me. And Wikipedia didn't explain it either. It is like reading books written from before 1940 where they use French or Latin phrases to illustrate a point (think, T. S. Eliot) without translating the phrase. I understand that an educated person was/is expected to know those languages but I admit my education was deficient. At least now I can use the internet to more easily remedy those shortcomings where for the previous fifty years I was just (more) lost.
It may be that no book on astrophysics and cosmology would be simple enough for me but, that said, I hate it when there is a throw-away line and I don't get it - like not understanding the punchline of a joke.
Specifically, Farrell writes (I think misspelling Wilhelm Olbers' name as"Olber") "...if the universe was truly infinite in space and time, why was the sky dark at night?" (p162). Now I'm sure the answer is obvious to most people but not to me. And Wikipedia didn't explain it either. It is like reading books written from before 1940 where they use French or Latin phrases to illustrate a point (think, T. S. Eliot) without translating the phrase. I understand that an educated person was/is expected to know those languages but I admit my education was deficient. At least now I can use the internet to more easily remedy those shortcomings where for the previous fifty years I was just (more) lost.