History of Astronomy 2015

You too can follow in the steps of the great astronomers such as Hipparchus, Galileo, Kepler and Hubble, who all contributed so much to our modern understanding of the cosmos. This book gives the student or amateur astronomer the following tools to replicate some of these seminal observations from their own homes:

How human communities interpret what they perceive in the sky is vital in fulfilling humankind’s most basic need to comprehend the universe it inhabits, both from a modern scientific perspective and from countless other cultural standpoints, extending right back to early prehistory.

The word “evolution” is generally taken to mean biological evolution. However, biological evolution is simply the natural consequence of cosmic, stellar, geological, and chemical evolution. “From Chaos to Consciousness: A Brief History of the Universe” is the story of human evolution in this broader sense of the word. It is a textbook intended for a one-semester course in Astronomy and, after a few introductory chapters on the history of astronomy and the present universe, is narrowly focused on material directly and chronologically related to the eventual rise of conscious beings in the universe.