Astronomy
- Ch.1 Naked-Eye Astronomy published
Before any geometric model of the heavens, human communities watched the sky carefully enough to govern their calendars, harvests, rituals, and politics. This chapter reads two parallel records on their own terms: the megalithic alignment t…
- Ch.2 Greek Geometric Cosmology published
In the sixth century BCE, in the Greek-speaking cities of Ionia, southern Italy, and Sicily, a small number of people insisted that the heavens were not merely regular but geometric — that the apparent motions of the sun, moon, and planets …
- Ch.3 Non-Western Astronomical Traditions published
Four mathematical astronomical traditions worked in parallel with the Greek-derived tradition between the second century BCE and the late fifteenth century CE. The Chinese imperial bureau treated sky-prediction as a state function and produ…
- Ch.4 The Copernican Turn published
Between Copernicus's *De revolutionibus orbium coelestium* (1543) and Galileo's trial (1633), the geocentric cosmos that had served Christendom and Islam for fourteen centuries was first geometrically rearranged on paper, then physically re…
- Ch.5 The Newtonian Synthesis published
Between Newton's *Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica* (1687) and Laplace's *Traité de mécanique céleste* (1799–1825), European astronomy was bound together by a single physical law — universal gravitation — expressed in the new mat…
- Ch.6 The 19th-Century Deep Sky published
Between William Herschel's 1781 discovery of Uranus and Hubble's 1924–25 resolution of the spiral-nebulae debate, the night sky became a stratified, chemically classified, distance-measured universe. The chapter traces five programmes — Her…
- Ch.7 The 20th-Century Cosmic Revolution published
Between Einstein's 1915 field equations of general relativity and the inflationary-cosmology consensus of the early 1980s, the universe stopped being a fixed Newtonian arena and became a four-dimensional dynamical system with a determinate …
- Ch.8 The 21st-Century Observational Era published
Between Mayor and Queloz's 1995 detection of 51 Pegasi b and JWST's first science release in July 2022, the discipline became three new things almost at once: an exoplanet-statistics science with thousands of confirmed planets, a precision-…
- Ch.9 Astronomy Now published
At draft time the discipline holds a six-parameter cosmological model constrained to better than a percent, a catalogue of thousands of confirmed exoplanets, and a multi-messenger inheritance running from the LIGO 2015 detection through the…