In this masterpice, Michael Benson tells the thrilling story of the discovery and description of the universe in a new way. Selecting artful and profound illustrations and maps, many hidden away in the world’s great science libraries and virtually unknown today, he chronicles more than 1,000 years of humanity’s ever-expanding understanding of the size and shape of space itself. He shows how the invention of the telescope inspired visions of unimaginably distant places and explains why today we turn to supercomputer simulations to reveal deeper truths about space-time.
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In 1845, Anglo-Irish astronomer William Parsons draw the spellbinding spiral structures of what were thought to be nebulae within the Milky Way with his six-ton telescope the ‘Leviathan.’ The drawing became a sensation throughout Europe and inspired Van Gogh’s iconic ‘The Starry Night.’ (Courtesy of the Wolbach Library, Harvard)
