Voyage to the Great Attractor: Exploring Intergalactic Space

by Alan Dressler

With lucidity and grace, a brilliant cosmologist here describes his work and illuminates his world.
Seeking to explain how astronomy is made and what he himself does, Alan Dressler tells the story of a decade-long study he undertook with six colleagues to determine whether the universe has expanded smoothly and symmetrically since its creation.
He leads us through the research step by step. We see close up the background of each scientist involved in the project. We discover how they work together; how their complementary skills - and their differences - are instrumental in their formation of hypotheses about our origins, and how these hypotheses must be proven or modified one by one if we are to find explanations for phenomena that can rarely be directly observed in detail.
We watch the team probing intergalactic space and arriving ultimately at the discovery that our Milky Way galaxy and its neighbors are moving toward a Great Attractor - a distant continent of matter, mostly invisible, containing thousands of galaxies.
We see how the work done by this group of scientists blends with the work of other astronomers who have discovered that galaxies, previously thought to be more or less evenly distributed through the universe, are actually collected into huge superclusters separated by vast empty voids. And we arrie at an understanding of how the strength and texture of this pattern - the contrast between the superclusters of galaxies and the voids - may well reveal the nature of matter and energy in the first moments after the big bang, during which time events took place that predestined the universe in which we came to be.
A gripping account and exploration - clear and challenging and poetic - of what drives the scientist to feats of discovery: the search for order and the overwhelming need to know why things happen as they do.

Genres: Science, Astronomy, Space, Nonfiction, Physics

355 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Matt Mayevsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pierwsze wydanie książki miało miejsce w 1994 roku. Jak na szybki napływ nowych danych w naukach fizycznych odległość w czasie niemała.

Narracja przebiega tu dwutorowo.

Pierwszy tor: Autor (uczestnik projektu) prowadzi nas przez turbulentny proces badań nad galaktykami eliptycznymi. Znajdą się tu osobiste refleksje, reminiscencje sięgające dzieciństwa Autora, a także przybliżenie sylwetek poszczególnych uczestników projektu badawczego.
Drugi tor: Autor z podziwu godnym talentem popularyzatorskim opowiada o wydarzeniach i zjawiskach kosmologicznych - związanych rzecz jasna z opowiadanym przebiegiem projektu.

Całość warta przeczytania. Nie jest to jeszcze jedna książeczka popularnonaukowa o kosmologii + fizyce kwantowej. Publikacja umożliwia wgląd w naturę pracy współczesnych astronomów i astrofizyków, w niszowej wydawałoby się dziedzinie.

Ps. Dodatkowym smaczkiem w książce jest opis biblijnego stworzenia świata, zmodyfikowany przez Autora, na modłę kwantową.

[SnowGator · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very readable, the author did a great job at balancing hard science with a humanizing narrative.

[Cassie Sands · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Dressler included a nice mix of scientific knowledge and process in addition to some of his personal experiences that shaped and surrounded his work. As someone who has a fair amount of astronomical knowledge for a layman I was pleasantly surprised by how many new things I learned in this book, especially considering that it was written twenty years ago. Great read!

[Buddy Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book about science and how it is conducted in the modern world. It is actually about the search for an explanation of how fast galaxies are moving, both as part of the "Hubble expansion" and as part of their own peculiar velocities. The search for data and the attempts to build theories to match the data found is what the book is all about, complete with discussion of how the fact that scientist are human has much to do with how much science can get done and how well. I realize that we have discovered much since this book was published (1994), but I recommend reading this for anyone who wants a brutally honest depiction of how science and scientists work.

[Stephen Journeay · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you have any interest in the universe, you should read this book, even though it is somewhat dated and I'm sure many new objects have been discovered and our understanding has grown. Why is the universe expanded in the manner we measure? Here is a suggestion.