New Book on Transit of venus

[Richard Romeo]

Princeton University Press




                       June 8, 2004--Venus in Transit

                       Eli Maor

                       Cloth | 2000 | $22.95 / £14.50
                       176 pp. | 5 x 8 | 25 line illustrations, 14 halftones

                       In 2004, Venus will cross the sun's face for the 
first time since 1882. Some will not bother to
step outside. Others will plan for years, reserving tickets to see the 
transit in its entirety. But even this group of astronomers and experience 
seekers will be attracted not by scientific
purpose but by the event's beauty, rarity, and perhaps--after this 
book--history. For previous sky-watchers, though, transits afforded the only 
chance to determine the all-important
astronomical unit: the mean distance between earth and sun.

                       Eli Maor tells the intriguing tale of the five Venus 
transits observed by humans and the fantastic
efforts made to record them. This is the story of heroes and cowards, of 
reputations earned and squandered, told against a backdrop of phenomenal 
geopolitical and scientific change.
                       With a novelist's talent for the details that keep 
readers reading late, Maor tells the stories of
how Kepler's misguided theology led him to the laws of planetary motion; of 
obscure Jeremiah Horrocks, who predicted the 1639 transit only to die, at 
age 22, a day before he was to
discuss the event with the only other human known to have seen it; of the 
unfortunate Le Gentil, whose decade of labor was rewarded with obscuring 
clouds, shipwreck, and the plundering of his estate by relatives who 
prematurely declared him dead; of David
Rittenhouse, Father of American Astronomy, who was overcome by the 1769 
transit's onset and failed to record its beginning; and of Maximilian Hell, 
whose good name long suffered
from the perusal of his transit notes by a color-blind critic.

                       Moving beyond individual fates, Maor chronicles how 
governments' participation in the first
international scientific effort--the observation of the 1761 transit from 
seventy stations, yielding a surprisingly accurate calculation of the 
astronomical unit using Edmund Halley's posthumous
directions--intersected with the Seven Years' War, British South Seas 
expansion, and growing American scientific prominence. Throughout, Maor 
guides readers to the upcoming Venus transits in 2004 and 2012, 
opportunities to witness a phenomenon seen by no living person
and not to be repeated until 2117.

                       Eli Maor is Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at 
Loyola University in Chicago. He is author of e: The Story of a Number, 
Trigonometric Delights, and To Infinity and Beyond (all
                       Princeton).
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