Product Description

From the internationally acclaimed author of Magnificent Universe, Ken Croswell, comes the definitive story of the golden age in our understanding of the universe -- the age we live in right now. The universe's origin, evolution, and fate have long fascinated humanity, but until recently these subjects resided in astronomy's never-never land. The last ten years, however, have witnessed a stunning turnabout: an avalanche of new cosmological discoveries that illuminate the greatest questions of all. The Universe at Midnight is a platform from which to observe these new deep-space landmarks.

Mammoth new telescopes on Earth, such as the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the Very Large Telescope in Chile, and Japan's Subaru Telescope, as well as the Hubble Space Telescope overhead, are probing the frontiers of the universe with stunning results. In 1996 astronomers pinpointed the center of the elusive "Great Attractor," a mass of galaxies 250 million light-years away that is trying to tug our Galaxy and thousands of others across the universe. In late 1997, two teams hunting supernovae in galaxies billions of light-years away shocked their colleagues by discovering that the universe's expansion is speeding up. Then in 2001, astronomers spotted a supernova near the perimeter of the known universe, its light emerging from the ancient epoch before the universe began accelerating. Meanwhile, studies closer to home -- right in the Milky Way -- lit up debate on the mysterious dark matter that pervades the cosmos: is it dying stars, primordial black holes, or some substance presently un-known to science? As a result of the discoveries flowing from these and other breakthroughs in astronomy, we are finally beginning to see the universe at midnight, not merely imagine it.

Dr. Croswell writes in his first chapter, "Every star the naked eye can see races around a gigantic black hole buried behind the dust clouds of the constellation Sagittarius." With insight, eloquence, and the authority of an astronomer, he proceeds to tell the riveting story of the discoveries that have revolutionized modern cosmology, while introducing the colorful and inspiring characters behind them. The Universe at Midnight puts discoveries old and new into fresh perspective, explaining what the big bang, the Hubble constant, quintessence, and the cosmological constant really mean -- and offering a brand new forecast for the universe's ultimate fate: the cosmos will expand forever, forever faster, until nearly all other galaxies slip out of sight. Here is your passport for an exhilarating nighttime flight to the edge of the cosmos.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #791208 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The battles to ascertain the values of three little "constants," whose importance far surpasses their size, form the center of this first-rate survey of cosmology's development over the last 100 years. They are the Hubble constant, or the universe's present expansion rate; the universe's matter density, or omega; and lambda, the cosmological constant, which counteracts gravity and pushes the universe apart. Croswell (Alchemy of the Heavens; Planet Quest) dishes surprisingly engrossing intergalactic dirt on the cutthroat competition among cosmologists, few of whom will be familiar to most readers. Some readers, therefore, may feel their heads start to spin like a spiral galaxy as they attempt to keep track of all the interactions between the different constants and which cosmologist is pushing which value at what point. (For the more scientifically inclined, there are 20 pages of tables, along with an excellent glossary and extensive bibliography.) Recently, scientists quite unexpectedly discovered that the universe is expanding faster and faster, generating the dreaded lambda force. In the far distant future the universe will be a gargantuan cold, dark void as recently reported in a Time cover story. Readers whose interest has been piqued by the mass media reports will find this a comprehensive and understandable explanation of our eventual doom's mechanics.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Croswell (Planet Quest) ranks with the likes of Timothy Ferris, Alan Lightman, Donald Goldsmith, Dennis Overbye, and John Gribbin among the elite of popularizers of astronomy and cosmology. The field is crowded, however, and his new work, while quite good in its own right, offers little new information. Covering the history of 20th century cosmology, with emphasis on the Big Bang theory and its implications for the ultimate fate of the universe, Midnight would be a good first read for somebody unfamiliar with the subject. Still, many of these scientific discoveries have been told literally dozens of times, and fans of this genre will learn nothing new. To his credit, Croswell does focus on the most recent research, but even there a reader would profit more from Ferris's more engaging The Whole Shebang (LJ 2/15/97). A marginal purchase. Gregg Sapp, Science Lib., SUNY at Albany
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
With many cosmologists rendering the verdict that the universe will expand forever, scientist-writers, such as physicists Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin in The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity (1999), have filled the void for readers curious about the justifications and implications of that conclusion. Astronomer Croswell contributes this approachable survey of cosmology since it matured into a legitimate science. In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble, building on earlier progress in measuring distances to galaxies, proved they were not only located beyond the Milky Way (hitherto thought to be the totality of the universe) but were receding from it at a rate that increased with distance. The value of that rate, the eponymous Hubble constant, is one of three parameters determining the fate of the universe; the other two are the quantity of material out there and the "cosmological constant," a repulsive force that seems to be accelerating the expansion of the universe. A clearly written overview that demystifies cosmology for the general reader. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

"Will you sleep at night?"
Midnight. The time when most of the Earth's population is resting it's head. But if you were to take a step outside on a clear night, and turn your eyes up toward the heavens, you would be graced with a beautiful sight. A grand sweep of planets, stars, and galaxies that can hold your gaze long after your neck has begun to cramp. The seemingly unchanging night sky that has mystified, frightened, inspired, and guided people for countless generations.

But ever have we sought to understand it. And while this book doesn't attempt to answer the question of why we seek the knowledge, it does do an excellent job of showing where our seeking has taken us. From learning how the sun and other stars burn their fuel and how they continue to exist, to probing the very furthest reaches of the observable universe, Croswell gives us the facts, the controversies, the theories, and the people behind them all, giving us a well written book that is just as much of a page turner (if not more so) as a best-selling novel.

In the first chapter we are taken on a quick romp through the cosmos as we see our solar system being flung around a super giant black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy that is hidden from our view by that ever so dusty Centaur (a.k.a. Sagittarius). We see that there are other galaxies close by in our local cluster that are just part of many clusters held together in a large supercluster. Looking even further we see many more of these giant superclusters, and even further the quasars, displaying massive amounts of energy.

From there we move on into the main bulk of the book, our gradual realization of the universe, what it is, what is it's past, and short but very informative biographies of the people behind the ideas. From the beginning of this we are thrown headlong into the first problem that we watch unravel, why is the night sky dark, instead of being bright with the light of an almost infinite amount of stars? And as we are being led down this path of understanding we see Edgar Allen Poe of all people coming up with the answer that there hasn't been enough time for the light of all the stars that exist to reach us. Something that we easily understand today, but this was a major issue for astronomers in the 1800's. It was incredibly hard to believe at fist that as we look at the world around us we are actually seeing things as they were, not as they are, because light takes time to reach our eyes, whether it is a super tiny sliver of a second while watching a live football game or seeing a galaxy 500 million light years away.

After reading about the final debate that this book covers (a debate which is about nothing less than the age of the universe, which is still being heavily debated with the middle ground being around sixteen billion years,) we are given a glimpse of our future in the cosmos. Croswell begins this with a vivid description of our aging Earth and how to survive with our planet intact over the next quintillion years or so. We learn what to do when our sun eventually goes nova, blowing away most of its burning atmosphere which besides the fact of losing our source of heat and light would easily consume us and even reach as far as Mars in the massive burn out of our nurturing star. When this happens we should be advanced enough to move our chunk of starless rock to any star in the vicinity that happens to catch our fancy. If we are lucky enough to still be around when we run out of stars in our galaxy to hop around to we are given a loose plan for herding brown dwarves (superdense shells of stars that have long since stopped burning, as will happen to our Sun after the above mentioned nova,) up, smashing them together to create a new star, giving us billions more years to consume all the brown dwarves in the galaxy. But Croswell says that long before we revert to chasing star shells we will lose the rest of the universe, at least observationally, because the universe is expanding faster than light can reach us, and every day something slips past that horizon of the observable, until 150 billion years from now, ours, and the few thousand or so other galaxies in our local supercluster are all that we will ever see again. To quote Croswell, "With sufficient ingenuity, the Earth can survive and even thrive, but it will do so in a universe that grows ever colder, ever darker, ever emptier."

In closing I will say this. Ken Croswell has shown us the exciting times that we live in, with major discoveries happening and soon to happen, giving me an urge to buy a telescope and to wonder why I didn't pursue that long dormant dream of being an astronomer. Oh well, I am happy where I am right now anyhow and I hear that in amateur astronomy you get to set your own hours to use the telescope.

This is truly a wonderful book that I would recommend to anyone curious about astronomy.

The Universe at Midnight
Dr. Ken Croswell has written another fascinating, page turning, and a stay up all night: "In astronomy, there's still too much to explore" [my mislabelled quotation].
Although other reviewers wanted more pictures, drawings, or diagrams, it's really the rewarding descriptive writing and your mind's imaginations of his descriptions: "hordes of foreground stars speckled the photographs, raindrops on a celestial windshield, further obstructing the view."
I really was quite awestruck by the knowledge of the current observable lookback distance of 14.5 billion light years in any direction to the estimated non-observable, current galactic distance is somewhere out to 47 billion light years in any direction. We are, in a sense, at the center of the observable Universe!
The master moral dilemma, naturally, poised by Dr. Croswell:
as the most intelligent species on Earth, what are we going to do with our intelligences? We have a moral and ethical obligation to use our creative, imaginative, and awesome capacity towards all other species and to ourselves now and into the, maybe, distant future. We are also capable of much nastiness and extinction. As the only known Galactic planetary civilzation (ex: Asimov's Foundation series), we must education ourselves and everyone else about our Cosmic potentials! And, then, act on them.
Don't rely on me or this review--read the book!

Reads like a good mystery!
I have read previous works from Dr. Croswell, and found this to be the best yet. There is enough background info on the characters, their lives, and the chronological order of the research, to keep you riveted, but not so much that the lay reader becomes scared of the subject. I think the greatest aspect of this book is that my thirteen year old daughter read it, and it has given her the impetus to explore many of these aspects of the science in greater detail. What more could you ask for?