Celestial Mechanics : the Waltz of the Planets
A. Celletti (Author), Ettore Perozzi (Author)
I was delighted to be invited by my colleagues Alessandra Celletti and Ettore Perozzi to provide a foreword to their book, Celestial Mechanics: The Waltz of the Planets. Having known them for many years and long admired their work in the subject so many of us love and are fascinated by, 1 read with great attention and pleasure the text when it arrived. It is a formidable task they have set themselves, to provide a book that describes attempts by successive generations of astronomers from the dawn of history five millennia ago to observe, record and understand the phenomena of the heavens, particularly the intricate and perplexing behaviour of the planets. Sun and Moon. As naked eye astronomy became aided by the telescope and the photographic plate, and since the middle of the twentieth century, by instruments launched on spacecraft into circum- Earth orbit or to the Moon and planets and beyond, the discovery of new satellites, scores of them, and ring systems displaying new and initially perplexing behaviour also demanded explanations for that behaviour. It is also the inspiring story of science itself with special reference to how lonely individuals, impelled by curiosity and dedicated to seeking the truth, and nothing but the truth, about the fascinating phenomena of nature, ultimately became accepted as scientists, those players in the most successful endeavour ever engaged in by the human race
Observations
1 online resource (XXIV, 248 pages 20 illustrations) : online resource
9780387685779, 0387685774
1112519099
Printed edition:
Around and around
Three bodies and no solution
Celestial waltz
Cosmic spinning tops
Our chaotic Solar System
Singularities, collisions and threatening bodies
Of Moon and man
Rock around the planets
Lords of the rings
At the edge of the Solar System
On the road to exolife