In Search of Planet Vulcan by Richard P Baum Md

In Search of Planet Vulcan by Richard P Baum Md

Presented for the first time in popular form is the fascinating true story of the search for the phantom planet Vulcan. As with legends of the lost continent of Atlantis, scientists and dreamers alike have sought to prove that Vulcan is more than just a myth. Historians of astronomy Richard Baum and William Sheehan have combed the continents, digging through dusty letters and journals, to unravel this mysterious and captivating tale. The planet first assumed a shadowy reality against a backdrop of war and revolution early in the nineteenth century. Le Verrier, the autocratic Director of the Paris Observatory, had unveiled a problem with the motion of the planet Mercury. The indications were of a planet closer to the sun than Mercury. Incredibly, the prediction was immediately fulfilled by an obscure French country doctor using no more than a homemade telescope. The planet, named for the Roman god of fire, was no sooner discovered than it was lost. Still it reappeared often enough to tantalize even skeptics into considering its shadowy existence possible. This fast-paced tale follows the exploits of Le Verrier, and later of his followers, in a pursuit of his unbridled obsessions: to extend the universality of Newton's Laws, to prove Vulcan's existence, and to secure his place in history as one of the greatest astronomers of his time. Stranger than fiction, the story reaches an exciting climax in the final showdown in the unlikeliest of places: America's Wild West. Like gunslingers at high noon, determined astronomers of the opposing camps brave Indians and the elements in their attempt to prove once and for all whether the planet exists. They congregate with some of the most illustrious names of their time for the final test: a grand eclipse of the sun.

William Sheehan is an astronomical historian and author. He is a regular scholar-in-residence at leading observatories, including Yerkes, Lick, Lowell and Mt. Wilson. As both a professional psychiatrist and an astronomer, he has a unique insight into the personalities of the pioneering figures of the history of science. He has published a number of books on the history of solar system studies, especially on the Moon and Mars. Sheehan is a consulting editor of Sky & Telescope, a 2001 fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for his research on the Milky Way, and a recipient of the Gold Medal of the Oriental Astronomical Association. Asteroid no. (16037) is named in his honor.
Robert W. Smith is a Professor at the University of Alberta in the Department of History and Classics. He directed the Science, Technology and Society Program in the Faculty of Arts. Smith served as the Walter Hines Page Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina in 1993-94. He held the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History at the U.S. National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution during the academic year 2006-07. He is a winner of the History of Science Society's Watson Davis Prize and in 2020 he was awarded the Leroy E. Doggett Prize in Historical Astronomy by the American Astronomical Society. Smith has written numerous groundbreaking articles about the discovery of Neptune.
Trudy E. Bell, contributing editor for Sky & Telescope and member of the editorial board for Springer's Historical & Cultural Astronomy series of books, earned her M.A. in the history of science and American intellectual history from New York University (1978). Her particular research interest is nineteenth-century US astronomy. The author or coauthor of a dozen books, she has been senior writer for the University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center, and an editor for Scientific American and IEEE Spectrum magazines. Her journalism and research awards include the David N. Schramm Award from the American Astronomical Society (2006) and the Herbert C. Pollock Award of the Dudley Observatory (2004 and 2007). Asteroid (323552) is named in her honour.
Carolyn Kennett, FRAS, is a writer, researcher and astronomer who lives in the southwest of England. She is co-editor of the Society for the History of Astronomy Bulletin. She delivers creative engagement opportunities for history, science and astronomy as a director of Mayes Creative Ltd and a director of Cornwall Sea to Stars. She runs her own business Archaeoastronomy Cornwall.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780306455674
ISBN 10	0306455676
Title	In Search of Planet Vulcan
Author	Richard P Baum Md
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Springer Science+Business Media
Year published	1997-01-01
Number of pages	310
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable