Deep Field

About This Book

For all of human history, we studied the heavens from the bottom of an ocean of air that keeps us alive and blurs everything we try to see through it. The dream of this book is the dream of rising above that air — of lifting a great mirror clear of the atmosphere and letting the ancient light of the cosmos fall onto it undisturbed. It took three centuries of optics, a Cold War's worth of rockets, and tens of billions of dollars to make that dream real. Twice.

In Deep Field, E.B Cohen tells the whole of that improbable story in one sweeping, accessible volume — the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes as a single continuous human endeavor. It runs from Galileo's crude tube and Henrietta Leavitt's pulsing stars to the humiliating flaw in Hubble's mirror and the astronauts who gave a telescope glasses in orbit; from the deep fields that revealed a universe crowded with galaxies to Webb's folded golden mirror unfurling a million miles from Earth, and the first galaxies, alien atmospheres, and cosmic mysteries it has begun to reveal.

Every hard idea — why the air blurs the stars, why infrared light lets us see backward in time, how you weigh an invisible black hole, how you read the chemistry of a world you will never visit — is built up from scratch, in plain language, with everyday pictures to hold on to. Even-handed, vivid, and startlingly clear, this is the story of how a species on a pale blue dot learned to see the universe as it truly is.