Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos

A strikingly lucid account of the expansion, not just of the universe, but of the way we have tried to understand it, from the Babylonians to black holes and dark matter.--Richard Holmes, By the Book,New York Times Book Review

Part history, part science, all illuminating. If you want to understand the greatest ideas that shaped our current cosmic cartography, read this book.--Adam G. Riess, Nobel Laureate in Physics, 2011

This book provides a tour of the greatest hits of cosmological discoveries--the ideas that reshaped our universe over the past century. The cosmos, once understood as a stagnant place, filled with the ordinary, is now a universe that is expanding at an accelerating pace, propelled by dark energy and structured by dark matter. Priyamvada Natarajan, our guide to these ideas, is someone at the forefront of the research--an astrophysicist who literally creates maps of invisible matter in the universe. She not only explains for a wide audience the science behind these essential ideas but also provides an understanding of how radical scientific theories gain acceptance.