Dennis Danielson - Böcker

Planet Earth has been a familiar concept for a mere fraction of recorded history. Until about the mid-1600s, most humans thought of Earth as immobile, likely either dim or simply invisible from the Moon or anywhere else in the heavens, and not (like the planets) participating in what Galileo called "the dance of the stars." A Universe of Earths: Our Planet and Other Worlds, from Copernicus to NASA retraces the exhilarating story of how all that changed, and how we came to perceive the Earth as a "wandering star." It's a story that has vastly augmented and enriched our understanding of how Earth and its inhabitants fit into the big picture of the Cosmos. But almost as soon as humans started to grasp that Earth is a planet, many also began wondering if perhaps the other planets might be earths. This bold conjecture ignited the whole gripping history and literature of space travel, of extraterrestrials, of other worlds. And yet the thesis that the Universe is full of other worlds like Earth has from the start been fuelled more by imagination than by scientific evidence. For all its appeal, it has consistently been undermined by observations of the actual Universe. A Universe of Earths offers a surprising alternative to that "other worlds" account, one that releases humans not only from the pre-Copernican view of Earth as low, lowly, dark, a cosmic sump, but also from the persistent modern aspersion of Earth as cosmically ordinary, "mediocre," "dethroned." Instead, from Copernicus to the present, we are confronted with the bracing realization that Earth is in the classical sense a star, a dynamically wandering one, and a bright, maybe even peerless participant in the dance of the stars.

An accessible, helpful guide for any student of Milton, whether undergraduate or graduate, introducing readers to the scope of Milton's work, the richness of its historical relations, and the range of current approaches to it. This second edition contains several new and revised essays, reflecting increasing emphasis on Milton's politics, the social conditions of his authorship and the climate in which his works were published and received, a fresh sense of the importance of his early poems and Samson Agonistes, and the changes wrought by gender studies on the criticism of the previous decade. By contrast with other introductions to Milton, this Companion gathers an international team of scholars, whose informative, stimulating and often argumentative essays will provoke thought and discussion in and out of the classroom. The Companion's reading lists and extended bibliography offer readers the necessary tools for further informed exploration of Milton studies.

What is the cosmos? How did it come into being? How are we related to it, and what is our place in it? The Book of the Cosmos assembles for the first time in one volume the great minds of the Western world who have considered these questions from biblical times to the present. It is a book of many authors-Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Galileo are here, of course, in all their genius, but so are Edgar Allan Poe, Annie Jump Cannon (a "human computer" and lyrical classifier of stars), and Sir Martin Rees, who proposes an "ensemble of universes" of which ours happens to be among the most interesting.In these pages the universe is made and unmade in a variety of configurations it spins along on superstrings, teems with intelligent life, and could end without warning. The Book of the Cosmos provides a thrilling read to set the heart racing and the mind soaring.

This volume brings John Milton's Paradise Lost into dialogue with the challenges of cosmology and the world of Galileo, whom Milton met and admired: a universe encompassing space travel, an earth that participates vibrantly in the cosmic dance, and stars that are 'world[s] / Of destined habitation'. Milton's bold depiction of our universe as merely a small part of a larger multiverse allows the removal of hell from the center of the earth to a location in the primordial abyss. In this wide-ranging work, Dennis Danielson lucidly unfolds early modern cosmological debates, engaging not only Galileo but also Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler, and the English Copernicans, thus placing Milton at a rich crossroads of epic poetry and the history of science.