Looking up to the stars

摘要

I am in two minds about this hefty tome. Should I be embarrassed for Stephen Hawking because an enterprising publisher has inveigled him into putting his name to a collection of superseded texts? Or should I be outraged that an eminent scientist, but one with no track record in the history of science, has the arrogance to endorse historical introductions for five classics of science? On the Shoulders of Giants comprises English versions of texts from five distinguished cosmologists―Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Einstein―each preceded by a 6-8-page commentary on the life and work of the author. Included in these texts are Copernicus' paean to the heliocentric system, Galileo's formulation of projectile motion, Kepler's harmonic law, Newton's law of gravitation, and Einstein's equation E=mc~2. However, these key passages are not highlighted: they are buried in long, technical treatises with no clue as to where to locate them. Neither will you find Galileo's arguments for a heliocentric system, nor Kepler's law of areas or ellipses, because the appropriate texts are not included.