Dava Sobel

The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of one man's forty-year obsession to find a solution to the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day—"the longitude problem."
Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day-and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration...

The little-known true story of the unexpected and remarkable contributions to astronomy made by a group of women working in the Harvard College Observatory from the late 1800s through the mid-1900s.--

Using her deep knowledge, her skills as a storyteller, and her imagination, Dava Sobel illuminates one of history's most significant and far-reaching meetings. In the spring of 1539, a young German mathematician—Georg Joachim Rheticus—journeyed hundreds of miles to northern Poland to meet the legendary, elderly cleric and reluctant astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Some two decades earlier, Copernicus had floated the mind-boggling theory...

This fully illustrated edition of the international best-seller Longitude recounts in words and images the epic quest to solve the greatest scientific problem of the eighteenth and three prior centuries: determining how a captain could pinpoint his ship's location at sea. All too often, voyages ended in disaster when crew and cargo were either lost at sea or destroyed upon the rocks of an unexpected landfall. Thousands of lives and the fortunes of...

When she was 13, Virginia Galilei, eldest daughter of the great scientist Galileo, was placed by her father in a convent near him in Florence and took the name Suor Maria Celeste. Unable to see him except on his occasional visits, she wrote him continually, as her 124 surviving letters (which Galileo kept) attest. Now, for the first time, all of these letters are reproduced in English, translated by Dava Sobel, and in their original Italian, and Ms....

Dramatization of Galileo Galilei's life, including his scientific achievements and his defense of his controversial theory that the earth revolves around the sun. Also includes how letters from his illegitimate daughter, Maria Celeste, a cloistered nun, have shed new light on Galileo's discoveries and his trial for heresy.