On Reading Raymo's Walking Zero
I've recently finished reading Walking Zero : Discovering Cosmic Space and Time Along the Prime Meridian. (New York : Walker & Company, 2006; 194 pages) by Chet Raymo. It was an absolute delight.
It's sort of a poetic rumination on how, since antiquity, what we know about how old the Earth is, how old the universe is, what orbits what, and how big the universe is has changed until, today, we find ourselves on our tiny planet in an empty sea of unimaginable vastness and age. He tells the story well and covers some of my favorite topics, like the invention of time zones.
I think I wrote most of what I wanted to say about the book in my book note, but I did want to mention it. That also give me the chance to point out that it was my first book in the Science-Book Challenge 2008! (Or: the other Science-Book Challenge page.)
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on Thursday, 31 January 2008 at 22.00
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This book sounds fascinating; of course your as-ever elegant write up makes it very appealing. I've just picked up a Carl Sagan that I may begin this weekend…
on Thursday, 7 February 2008 at 19.05
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I've just finished Walking Zero. As you say, a delightful read, though it's amazing how far afield Raymo reaches to bring what he wants to talk about within reach of the prime meridian between Peacehaven and the Humber.
A few grammatical glitches caught my eye on the way through. One sentence (I didn't stop to mark it) that makes no sense, obviously edited once to often. And I yelled at him when he spoke of "astronomer royals", and wasn't talking about members of the Royal Family who had a penchant for star-gazing; but was gratified a few pages later when he correctly spoke of the 15 astronomers royal who have occupied the position since its inception. And then, right at the end, he talks about "an Adrienne's thread of theory, observation, and unquenchable curiosity." I assume he means Ariadne.
What impresses me most, I think, is the remarkable achievements came about in the Restoration period, mostly through the members of the Royal Society. The video "Longitude," which dramatizes Dava Sobel's book of the same name, shows these men in their powdered wigs and eighteenth century dress, travelling to London by coach, or on foot, through a countryside almost bereft of roads, and in a city remarkable for filth, disease, and a quality of life which, even for the most affluent, would be unimaginably harsh for us today. I guess it just shows how much in advance of their times these men are. And it's the same always with science and technology, I guess: just think of the technology that NASA had to work with when it landed men on the moon in 1969. (I was in Florence, the home of Galileo, in a hotel whose windows looked out on the campanile of the cathedral when the landing took place, watching it on a small black-and-white television set in the breakfast room).
Jeff, there's a question that has always bothered me. Raymo's talk about the Hubble Space Telescope's Ultra Deep Field image (page 174) raised it for me again. I'm sure you have the answer, or the key to the flaw in my "reasoning," such as it is. The most distant of the thousands of galaxies seen in that image is 13 billion light years away. "The light from these most distant galaxies began its journey when the universe was only 5 percent of its present age" (174-175), and presumably only a small proportion of its present size. Now, the galaxies are speeding away from each other at some incredible speed. So if it has taken 13 billion years for light to come to us from that galaxy where it was then (in relation to the point in space that would become the earth at a considerably later date), how far away must it be now? Presumably a lot farther away than it was then?
on Friday, 8 February 2008 at 13.06
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Long Ago & Far Away
In a recent comment to a post I made about reading Chet Raymo's book Walking Zero, Bill asked an interesting question:
Jeff, there's a question that has always bothered me. Raymo's talk about the Hubble Space Telescope's Ultra Deep Field image (…