Celestial Treasury: From the Music of the Spheres to the Conquest of Space. Este artículo no está disponible.Celestial Treasury: From the Music of the Spheres to the Conquest of Space

Throughout history, the mysterious dark skies above us have inspired our imaginations in countless ways, influencing our endeavours in science and philosophy, religion, literature and art. Celestial Treasury is a truly beautiful book showing the richness of astronomical theories and illustrations in Western civilization through the ages, exploring their evolution, and comparing ancient and modern throughout. From Greek verse, mediaeval manuscripts and Victorian poetry to spacecraft photographs and computer-generated star charts, the unprecedented wealth of these portrayals is quite breathtaking. How did philosophers and scientists try to explain the order which seems to govern celestial motion? How did geometers and artists measure and map the skies? How many different answers have been proposed for the most fundamental of all questions: When and how did our world come about? Who inhabits the Heavens - gods, angels or extraterrestrials? The answers to these questions can be found among these stunning pages.

Marc Lachièze-Rey is a director of research at the Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique and astrophysicist at the Centre d'Etudes de Saclay. He is the author of the The Cosmic Background Radiation (1999), and Cosmology: A First Course (1995), both published by Cambridge University Press, and The Quest for Unity published by Oxford University Press (1999), as well as many books in French.

Jean-Pierre Luminet is a research director of the Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique, based at the Paris-Meudon observatory. In addition to many research papers in cosmology, the structure of space-time and relativistic astrophysics, he has written several popular science articles and books (including Black Holes, Cambridge University Press, 1992), as well as science documentaries for television. Beyond his outstanding scientific research, he is also a renowned expert in the history of cosmology, and astronomical art and poetry. His first novel, Le rendez-vous de Vénus, was published in 1999 by JC Lattès.