The secret sun

摘要

THERE are jaw-dropping moments in every astronomy lecturer's life, but you don't expect them to come from observations of carbon-based life forms. Once, when warning of the dangers of looking directly at the sun during an upcoming eclipse, a woman phoned into Bob Berman's radio show and asked: "If these eclipses are so dangerous, why do we keep having them?" It is easy to laugh, but there is a serious point here: most people are startlingly ignorant of some basic facts about the universe they inhabit. Berman's pitch-perfect book goes a long way to answering the questions you thought were too dumb to ask, but it does much more than simply provide facts.