Binding: Paperback Release Date: January 1998 Edition: 4 List Price:$69.00
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ISBN-13: 9780521645874 ISBN-10: 0521645875 Author: Andrew L. Chaikin Artist: Editor: J. Kelly Beatty, Carolyn Collins Peters Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Summary:
As the definitive guide for the armchair astronomer, The New Solar System has established itself as the leading book on planetary science and solar system studies. Incorporating the latest knowledge of the solar system, a distinguished team of researchers, many of them Principal Investigators on NASA missions, explain the solar system with expert ease. The completely-revised text includes the most recent findings on asteroids, comets, the Sun, and our neighboring planets. The book examines the latest research and thinking about the solar system; looks at how the Sun and planets formed; and discusses our search for other planetary systems and the search for life in the solar system. In full-color and heavily-illustrated, the book contains more than 500 photographs, portrayals, and diagrams. An extensive set of tables with the latest characteristics of the planets, their moon and ring systems, comets, asteroids, meteorites, and interplanetary space missions complete the text. New to this edition are descriptions of collisions in the solar system, full scientific results from Galileo's mission to Jupiter and its moons, and the Mars Pathfinder mission. For the curious observer as well as the student of planetary science, this book will be an important library acquisition. J. Kelly Beatty is the senior editor of Sky & Telescope, where for more than twenty years he has reported the latest in planetary science. A renowned science writer, he was among the first journalists to gain access to the Soviet space program. Asteroid 2925 Beatty was named on the occasion of his marriage in 1983. Carolyn Collins Petersen is an award-winning science writer and co-author of Hubble Vision (Cambridge 1995). She has also written planetarium programs seen at hundreds of facilities around the world. Andrew L. Chaikin is a Boston-based science writer. He served as a research geologist at the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Earth and Planetary Studies. He is a contributing editor to Popular Science and writes frequently for other publications.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Joyful companion on diverse disciplines of knowledge.
Customer Rating:
When other books fail to get me to sit down and read, this book has always been a true joy. The authors implemented the beauty of art and photography with the quest for the remote unknowns that allow the reader's imagination to grow freely. The contrast between the dark and immense space and colorful and selective graphs grasps the reader's curiosity for search for clues on the ultimate purpose of the universe.
During cold and long nights, that book brings the pleasure of rejoicing the triumph of our human race over myth and trivial conflicts that plagued our long history. The authors demonstrate the immense potential of science and international cooperation in space discovery. It also addresses fundamental issues such as the origin of both biological life as well as stellar and planetary life. Of course, the book did not attempt to explain why some elements were more abundant in the solar system than others, or whether there was an ultimate secret in the large space universe versus the immensely small nuclear core of atoms, or why atoms behaved in such manner that created life and organic matter. The book however laid out the authors' current knowledge about the solar system.
Compared to the construction of the Great Pyramids of Egypt, the space program has comparably gigantic antennas of 70 meters diameter, similarly gigantic rocket launching structures, oddly designed neutrino detectors of 40 meter by 40 meters and over a thousand of photo-detectors. The book displays such human yearning for the history-long quest for knowledge of the greater world, with comparable passion for integrating many fields of knowledge.
The sad fact about the science of astronomy is the minute number of scientists of merely 1500 worldwide. While the Pyramids were built thousands years ago with resourceful and generous commitment by the weak state, modern astronomers are confronted with indifferent statesmen and the public that is more interested in feeding, educating, and caring for its own exploding population growth.
As the authors stated in the book introduction, that book neither is a textbook or a coffee table book, but rather in between. The book includes plenty of tables, graphs, and photos without delving into the hard science of space physics. The book reads like an illustrated story telling about the events in the solar system. It thus provides the reader with plenty of food for thought.
The main drawback in the book is the variation of writing styles from one chapter to another since each chapter is written by a different coauthor. Such lack of systematic approach to each topic in the book leaves the reader with the extra task of sorting out its unexpected flow of thoughts. I would rather prefer the unified template of thought flow along all the chapters in order to facilitate the comparison between the different members of the solar system.
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Enjoyable & complete, our beautiful solar system.
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This book is packed full of exciting pictures and is an in depth look at the solar system based on that latest discoveries in space exploration. It is an exciting read for anyone who is into astronomy. Some parts of the book are filled with scientific detail that can be difficult to read, but can be understood if you are willing to get through them.
A glorious introduction to our solar system
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It's easy to read! You can read the chapters in just about any order. The material is mostly descriptive, without any complicated mathematics. And it's a terrific collection, with wonderful color pictures, graphs, and charts. This Fourth edition (1999) is the first to have pictures (and other data) of Jupiter and of the Jovian satellites taken by the Galileo mission. And yes, I suspect there will be a fifth edition which will include, among other new material, pictures of Saturn and its satellites taken by the Cassini mission.
This is the best possible introduction to the study of our Solar System. I'd recommend reading it before getting into a more formal university textbook on the subject.
Non-expert's opinion
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As a layperson reading this book, I find it very easy to understand what is being said, and I feel that I am learning a great deal from it. The writing is interesting enough to hold my attention and keep me from drifting off, which is a problem I have with many other science texts. Overall, I am finding reading this book an enjoyable experience.
Thorough planetology book for the non-expert public
Customer Rating:
This is a very thorough book, covering many important aspects of planetology. Its level of depth is very adequate to its intended public, that of non-expert but "science-literate" people. Although slightly out-of-date (it's been 5 years since its publication), most of its content is still considered correct. It is a shame that its Amazon average customer review has been degraded by Robert M Carto's unfortunate reviews. Unfortunate because they represent the opinion of someone who believes in the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky. Velikovsky's theories are considered unscientific by the vast majority of astronomy professional researchers (including myself) who have read them.
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