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larryhammerNew on Project Gutenberg: A Textbook of General Astronomy by Charles A. Young.
This is a university text from 1889. As in, written a generation before Erwin Hubble expanded our (conception of the) universe. Which means the book makes no distinction between what we call galaxies and other nebulae, the nature of which all are mysterious, and the universe is co-extensive with the Milky Way. (Which latter the author firmly asserts does not rotate -- this was a current debate.)
In short, a must-read for anyone interested in intellectual archeology. It's not as whacked-out fun as, say, the article on Chemistry in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published just a couple years before Lavoisier demonstrated the existence of oxygen and so describes phlogiston theory (with only the four elements) at its fullest flower -- for one thing, Young's solar system and stellar astronomy isn't flat-out wrong. But for anything larger, this is the Old Stuff, clearly and lucidly articulated.
Note: PDF only* -- because HTML fails utterly at formatting math. Still worth the price of downloading.**
* Well, plus LaTeX for the hard scientists.
** Free.
---L.
This is a university text from 1889. As in, written a generation before Erwin Hubble expanded our (conception of the) universe. Which means the book makes no distinction between what we call galaxies and other nebulae, the nature of which all are mysterious, and the universe is co-extensive with the Milky Way. (Which latter the author firmly asserts does not rotate -- this was a current debate.)
In short, a must-read for anyone interested in intellectual archeology. It's not as whacked-out fun as, say, the article on Chemistry in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published just a couple years before Lavoisier demonstrated the existence of oxygen and so describes phlogiston theory (with only the four elements) at its fullest flower -- for one thing, Young's solar system and stellar astronomy isn't flat-out wrong. But for anything larger, this is the Old Stuff, clearly and lucidly articulated.
Note: PDF only* -- because HTML fails utterly at formatting math. Still worth the price of downloading.**
* Well, plus LaTeX for the hard scientists.
** Free.
---L.