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Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax" Paperback – March 1, 2002
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A clever, thought-provoking guide that attacks common astronomical misconceptions
What is Bad Astronomy? Anything that accidentally or intentionally mangles the basic principles of astronomy. And who is on the lookout for good examples of Bad Astronomy? The Bad Astronomer, of course, a/k/a professional astronomer Phil Plait. In Bad Astronomy, Plait clears up misconceptions and malarkey relating to our Earth, moon, and the wider Universe. Ranging from commonly misunderstood notions such as why the sky is blue and the reason we have seasons, to large-scale shenanigans such as the so-called moon landing hoax and UFO sightings, Bad Astronomy wipes the stardust from readers' eyes to reveal just how the Universe works. Not only does Plait clearly explain the principles behind major concepts like the Big Bang, he leads readers to understand basics such as what makes the Moon look big when it rises and why the planets -- and astrology-- cannot directly influence our lives. Here is a fascinating and enlightening read for amateurs and experts alike. Bad Astronomy is the first volume in Wiley's "Bad Science" series; forthcoming titles will look at common misconceptions related to biology, weather, and the Earth.
- Print length277 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherJohn Wiley & Sons Inc
- Publication dateMarch 1, 2002
- Dimensions5.75 x 0.75 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-100471409766
- ISBN-13978-0471409762
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Review
"...a good read...Plait's book is readable, entertaining, not exclusively for astronomers, and often very funny..." -- Astronomy & Space, June 2003
"...a great book to dip into..." -- Popular Astronomy, January 2004
"...everything's beautifully explained. He gives the neatest explanation of tides I've ever seen...for that alone, this book should be in every school library on the planet." -- New Scientist, 4 May 2002
"...the book might be a better student introduction than many more sober tomes..." -- Times Higher Education Supplement, 7 June 2002
"The author sharply and convincingly dismisses astrology, creationism, and UFO sightings.... Plait succeeds brilliantly because his clear and understandable explanations are convincing and honest." -- Library Journal, March 15, 2002
"The author sharply and convincingly dismisses astrology, creationism, and UFO sightings.... Plait succeeds brilliantly because his clear and understandable explanations are convincing and honest." -- Library Journal, March 15, 2002
Inspired by his popular web site, www. badastronomy.com, this first book by Plait (astronomy, Sonoma State Univ.) debunks popular myths and misconceptions relating to astronomy and promotes science as a means of explaining our mysterious heavens. The work describes 24 common astronomical fallacies, including the beliefs that the Coriolis effect determines the direction that water drains in a bathtub and that planetary alignments can cause disaster on Earth. The author sharply and convincingly dismisses astrology, creationism, and UFO sightings and explains the principles behind basic general concepts (the Big Bang, why the sky is blue, etc.). Though some may find him strident, Plait succeeds brilliantly because his clear and understandable explanations are convincing and honest. This first volume in Wiley's "Bad Science" series is recommended for all libraries, especially astronomy and folklore collections. Jeffrey Beall, Univ. of Colorado Lib., Denver (Library Journal, March 15, 2002)
"...everything's beautifully explained. He gives the neatest explanation of tides I've ever seen...for that alone, this book should be in every school library on the planet." (New Scientist, 4 May 2002)
"...the book might be a better student introduction than many more sober tomes..." (Times Higher Education Supplement, 7 June 2002)
"Bad Astronomy is a book which is both timely and welcome. I would recommend it without hesitation, and I have no doubt that it will be widely read..." (The Observatory, October 2002)
For skeptics, always fans of science: The first two books in a series devoted to "bad science," Bad Astronomy by Philip Plait and Bad Medicine (Wiley, $15.95) by Christopher Wanjek, may warm even a Scrooge's heart. In short chapters, Plait tackles misperceptions about why the moon looks larger on the horizon and why stars twinkle before moving on, dismantling conspiracy kooks who doubt the moon landing and offering a top 10 list of bad science moments in movie history. Wanjek, a science writer who has also written jokes for The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live, takes an edgy and funny tack in debunking myths such as humans using only 100f their brains, the utility of "anti-bacterial" toys and the safety of "natural" herbal remedies, ones often loaded with powerful chemicals. (USA TODAY, December 3, 2002)
"...a good read...Plait's book is readable, entertaining, not exclusively for astronomers, and often very funny..." (Astronomy & Space, June 2003)
"...a great book to dip into..." (Popular Astronomy, January 2004)
From the Inside Flap
Bad Astronomy is just plain good! Philip Plait clears up every misconception on astronomy and space you never knew you suffered from. --Stephen Maran, Author of Astronomy for Dummies and editor of The Astronomy and Astrophysics Encyclopedia
Thank the cosmos for the bundle of star stuff named Philip Plait, who is the world's leading consumer advocate for quality science in space and on Earth. This important contribution to science will rest firmly on my reference library shelf, ready for easy access the next time an astrologer calls. --Dr. Michael Shermer, Publisher of Skeptic magazine, monthly columnist for Scientific American, and author of The Borderlands of Science
Philip Plait has given us a readable, erudite, informative, useful, and entertaining book. Bad Astronomy is Good Science. Very good science... --James The Amazing Randi, President, James Randi Educational Foundation, and author of An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural
Bad Astronomy is a fun read. Plait is wonderfully witty and educational as he debunks the myths, legends, and 'conspiracies? that abound in our society. 'The Truth Is Out There'?and it's in this book. I loved it! --Mike Mullane, Space Shuttle astronaut and author of Do Your Ears Pop in Space?
From the Back Cover
Advance praise for Philip Plait's Bad Astronomy
"Bad Astronomy is just plain good! Philip Plait clears up every misconception on astronomy and space you never knew you suffered from."
--Stephen Maran, Author of Astronomy for Dummies and editor of The Astronomy and Astrophysics Encyclopedia
"Thank the cosmos for the bundle of star stuff named Philip Plait, who is the world's leading consumer advocate for quality science in space and on Earth. This important contribution to science will rest firmly on my reference library shelf, ready for easy access the next time an astrologer calls."
--Dr. Michael Shermer, Publisher of Skeptic magazine, monthly columnist for Scientific American, and author of The Borderlands of Science
"Philip Plait has given us a readable, erudite, informative, useful, and entertaining book. Bad Astronomy is Good Science. Very good science..."
--James "The Amazing" Randi, President, James Randi Educational Foundation, and author of An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural
"Bad Astronomy is a fun read. Plait is wonderfully witty and educational as he debunks the myths, legends, and 'conspiracies' that abound in our society. 'The Truth Is Out There' and it's in this book. I loved it!"
--Mike Mullane, Space Shuttle astronaut and author of Do Your Ears Pop in Space
About the Author
PHILIP PLAIT, Ph.D., works in the physics and astronomy department at Sonoma State University in California. He maintains the Web site badastronomy.com and writes monthly articles on astronomy for the German newspaper Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His work has appeared in the Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook of Science and the Future and Astronomy magazine. He also writes a monthly column for astronomy.com.
Product details
- Publisher : John Wiley & Sons Inc; 1st edition (March 1, 2002)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 277 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0471409766
- ISBN-13 : 978-0471409762
- Item Weight : 12 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.75 x 0.75 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #914,793 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,624 in Astronomy (Books)
- #3,165 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
I'm an astronomer, author, writer, and science communicator - even an evangelizer, if I may! I love science in general and astronomy in particular, and my goal is to get people as excited and passionate about them as I am. I try to write my books to be informative, interesting, and most of all fun. Yes, even the one ("Death from the Skies!") about cosmic apocalyses.
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Bad Astronomy is loaded with interesting stuff. From explaining away Moon Hoax looniness to fixing common mental errors about seasons, quantum leaps, light years, tides, UFOs, and so on, this book is fantastic fun and intellectually invaluable.
Beyond his astronomy expertise, Plait is a wonderful example of the sort of positive and constructive science-based skeptic who brings more light to the world. His sincerity and enthusiasm jump out at you from every page.
"It's too easy to simply accept what you are told," writes Plait. "This is extraordinarily dangerous. If you just assume without thinking critically that someone is right, you may be voting for the wrong politician, or accepting a doctrine that has a bad premise, or buying a used car that might kill you. Science is a way of distinguishing good data from bad."
I highly recommend Bad Astronomy for everyone. It's highly readable. Anyone can handle it. Save the world, buy a copy for a high school kid today!
I also loved Plait's book, Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End . . .
--Guy P. Harrison, author of
50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God
and
Race and Reality: What Everyone Should Know about Our Biological Diversity
A casual spin of the Google directory returns over 600,000 results for "moon landing hoax." Naturally, some portion of these hits are by the debunkers, those war-torn heroes who continue to throw logic and sense at the convinced conspiracy cults. Yet even discounting the lights of reason embedded in these results, the fact remains that far too many still believe that America's voyage to the moon was no voyage at all: 6% of Americans, to be precise.
At first brush, and consumed without much in the way of science literacy, some of the doubts offered by hoaxers can sound marginally compelling. But first glances can be deceiving. And be warned: If you do wade into this cesspool of credulity, you may find yourself in contact with ideas that would make Roswell truthers blush. `The whole moon itself is faked and is projected onto the sky using the same technology used to project the Bat Signal'. Or something just as otherwordly. Conspiracy wonks are nothing if not creative, but you may find such departures from Reality unfit for public consumption. Don't venture too long.
To be sure, collapsing the arguments of moon landing deniers requires little more than a healthy dose of common sense infused with trace amounts of scientific acumen. They might try the following on for size:
1. Experts spanning the fields of astronomy, astrophysics, and photography all say we've been to the moon, and it's usually a good idea to defer to experts on matters in which you are, in fact, not one.
2. Global conspiracy theories on the scale necessary to fake a moon landing are probably infeasible given how many people would need to stay silent, from the hundreds of thousands of NASA engineers who worked on the Apollo project for nearly 10 years, the staging crews who fabricated and processed the footage for six different manned landings, the 12 men who claimed to have walked on the moon and the other astronauts who flew with them, and finally to the chain of command terminating with the Oval Office.
3. If the Soviet Union had the slightest inkling of imposture, they would have trumpeted it from the rooftops to the stars. We were, after all, waging an international space race at the time.
4. Photographic chicanery of the type required to spoof a moon landing did not exist.
5. Along with much third-party evidence, in recent years orbiting spacecraft have captured photos of the landing sites, the tracks left by the Apollo astronauts, and various remnants of the lunar surface experiments they conducted.
If exercising logic and countering similarly pseudoscientific moonshine is something you work into regular rotation, you'll find Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax" crowded with thrills and long on ammunition. In a way, this is the book Phil Plait, award-winning blogger and skeptic superstar, was always meant to write. The topics covered are the very ones he's written vibrantly about for more than a decade on his blog of the same name (now appearing on Slate). Fans of his work will be accustomed to the serviceable combination of wit, humor and academic rigor directed at scientific misinformation. His easily digestible tome is in this sense perfectly continuous with his veteran crusade to debunk all manner of `bunk'.
Astronomy is Plait's specialty, and his breadth of the stars is staggering. Sure, much of the information on offer here is a Google search away, but the comedic, accessible format and the assortment of diverse but neatly divisioned topics prove to be the book's redeeming qualities. And along with a pulverizing exposé on moon landing conspiracy theories, about a quarter of the way into the book you're treated with one of the best, if not the best, layman explanations of how tides work. Given all of the half-explanations and untruths swirling around online on this topic (Plait notes that even many textbooks have it wrong), it's refreshing to read a comprehensive breakdown of tidal physics that even an amateur can regurgitate. His deconstructions really are that good.
While we cannot be faulted for it, most of us live out our day entirely ignorant of the celestial wonders that loom just beyond the horizon. The sun, and the planets that race around it, each with its loyal retinue of moon or moons, all dance to intricate patterns and are governed by a dense filigree of physical relationships. Plait does a great job of exposing the profundity of the stars to which we are so often oblivious while putting to bed a few of the most pervasive inaccuracies lodged in our modern consciousness.
As it turns out, the seasons are not caused by the sun's intensity or by its distance from the earth. The moon is not larger near the horizon than when it's high overhead. Lunar phases are not the result of the earth's shadow dynamics. The sky is not blue because it reflects the color of the oceans. And, far from proving that no man has stepped foot on the surface of the moon, the fact that there are no stars in the Apollo 11 photographs simply shows that NASA knew how to work a camera. Plait's treatments are precise, no-nonsense and layered with enthusiasm.
Some chapters are less memorable than others: why you can balance an egg on its end any day of the year; why you can't glimpse stars in daylight; and why astrology carries as much science cred as Harry Potter struck me as less than revelatory. However, the sections on the Hubble Space Telescope, the "Velikovsky affair," the Big Bang—perhaps the most frequently misconceived of scientific theories—and his entertaining finale on bad astronomy in film all earn high marks.
Closing Thoughts
If you find science synonymous with entertainment, then Bad Astronomy is for you, especially if you're already familiar with Phil Plait's online persona. Not merely the arch-critic of pseudoscience, Plait is one of the few educators I know of who can graft humor onto science without falling victim to oversimplification or pulling from the standard bag of clichés. You won't just learn that the sky is blue because the earth's atmosphere scatters blue light more than other wavelengths, or that 2001: A Space Odyssey is the most scientifically authentic space movie ever. You'll also obtain a wonderful introduction to the underlying principles of astronomy and appreciate the admixture of humor throughout. Plait's book, his first, is an exercise in clear thinking fused with good science, necessities surely foreign to the moon landing deniers. Highly recommended.
Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2013
A casual spin of the Google directory returns over 600,000 results for "moon landing hoax." Naturally, some portion of these hits are by the debunkers, those war-torn heroes who continue to throw logic and sense at the convinced conspiracy cults. Yet even discounting the lights of reason embedded in these results, the fact remains that far too many still believe that America's voyage to the moon was no voyage at all: 6% of Americans, to be precise.
At first brush, and consumed without much in the way of science literacy, some of the doubts offered by hoaxers can sound marginally compelling. But first glances can be deceiving. And be warned: If you do wade into this cesspool of credulity, you may find yourself in contact with ideas that would make Roswell truthers blush. `The whole moon itself is faked and is projected onto the sky using the same technology used to project the Bat Signal'. Or something just as otherwordly. Conspiracy wonks are nothing if not creative, but you may find such departures from Reality unfit for public consumption. Don't venture too long.
To be sure, collapsing the arguments of moon landing deniers requires little more than a healthy dose of common sense infused with trace amounts of scientific acumen. They might try the following on for size:
1. Experts spanning the fields of astronomy, astrophysics, and photography all say we've been to the moon, and it's usually a good idea to defer to experts on matters in which you are, in fact, not one.
2. Global conspiracy theories on the scale necessary to fake a moon landing are probably infeasible given how many people would need to stay silent, from the hundreds of thousands of NASA engineers who worked on the Apollo project for nearly 10 years, the staging crews who fabricated and processed the footage for six different manned landings, the 12 men who claimed to have walked on the moon and the other astronauts who flew with them, and finally to the chain of command terminating with the Oval Office.
3. If the Soviet Union had the slightest inkling of imposture, they would have trumpeted it from the rooftops to the stars. We were, after all, waging an international space race at the time.
4. Photographic chicanery of the type required to spoof a moon landing did not exist.
5. Along with much third-party evidence, in recent years orbiting spacecraft have captured photos of the landing sites, the tracks left by the Apollo astronauts, and various remnants of the lunar surface experiments they conducted.
If exercising logic and countering similarly pseudoscientific moonshine is something you work into regular rotation, you'll find Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax" crowded with thrills and long on ammunition. In a way, this is the book Phil Plait, award-winning blogger and skeptic superstar, was always meant to write. The topics covered are the very ones he's written vibrantly about for more than a decade on his blog of the same name (now appearing on Slate). Fans of his work will be accustomed to the serviceable combination of wit, humor and academic rigor directed at scientific misinformation. His easily digestible tome is in this sense perfectly continuous with his veteran crusade to debunk all manner of `bunk'.
Astronomy is Plait's specialty, and his breadth of the stars is staggering. Sure, much of the information on offer here is a Google search away, but the comedic, accessible format and the assortment of diverse but neatly divisioned topics prove to be the book's redeeming qualities. And along with a pulverizing exposé on moon landing conspiracy theories, about a quarter of the way into the book you're treated with one of the best, if not the best, layman explanations of how tides work. Given all of the half-explanations and untruths swirling around online on this topic (Plait notes that even many textbooks have it wrong), it's refreshing to read a comprehensive breakdown of tidal physics that even an amateur can regurgitate. His deconstructions really are that good.
While we cannot be faulted for it, most of us live out our day entirely ignorant of the celestial wonders that loom just beyond the horizon. The sun, and the planets that race around it, each with its loyal retinue of moon or moons, all dance to intricate patterns and are governed by a dense filigree of physical relationships. Plait does a great job of exposing the profundity of the stars to which we are so often oblivious while putting to bed a few of the most pervasive inaccuracies lodged in our modern consciousness.
As it turns out, the seasons are not caused by the sun's intensity or by its distance from the earth. The moon is not larger near the horizon than when it's high overhead. Lunar phases are not the result of the earth's shadow dynamics. The sky is not blue because it reflects the color of the oceans. And, far from proving that no man has stepped foot on the surface of the moon, the fact that there are no stars in the Apollo 11 photographs simply shows that NASA knew how to work a camera. Plait's treatments are precise, no-nonsense and layered with enthusiasm.
Some chapters are less memorable than others: why you can balance an egg on its end any day of the year; why you can't glimpse stars in daylight; and why astrology carries as much science cred as Harry Potter struck me as less than revelatory. However, the sections on the Hubble Space Telescope, the "Velikovsky affair," the Big Bang—perhaps the most frequently misconceived of scientific theories—and his entertaining finale on bad astronomy in film all earn high marks.
Closing Thoughts
If you find science synonymous with entertainment, then Bad Astronomy is for you, especially if you're already familiar with Phil Plait's online persona. Not merely the arch-critic of pseudoscience, Plait is one of the few educators I know of who can graft humor onto science without falling victim to oversimplification or pulling from the standard bag of clichés. You won't just learn that the sky is blue because the earth's atmosphere scatters blue light more than other wavelengths, or that 2001: A Space Odyssey is the most scientifically authentic space movie ever. You'll also obtain a wonderful introduction to the underlying principles of astronomy and appreciate the admixture of humor throughout. Plait's book, his first, is an exercise in clear thinking fused with good science, necessities surely foreign to the moon landing deniers. Highly recommended.
All wrong. But you would not be alone. For a society as technologically advanced as ours (and if you're reading this, then chances are good that you live in a technologically advanced society), the general public has a big problem with science. People see it as being too hard to understand, or too removed from their daily lives. Politicians bemoan the fact that American schoolchildren are falling behind in science, but science funding is almost always on the list of cuts that can be made to save money. We love technology, but hate science, and that is a path to certain doom.
Of all the sciences, though, astronomy is perhaps the worst understood. A lot of people still confuse it with astrology, which is probably a huge part of the problem right there. For millennia, we have thought about the planets and stars as celestial things, unknown and unknowable by such base creatures as ourselves. It's only in the last hundred years or so that we've been able to rapidly improve our understanding of the universe, and popular knowledge hasn't caught up with that yet.
And so bad misconceptions of astronomy persist in the public imagination.
Fortunately, we have people like Phil Plait to set the record straight, and that is indeed what he does in this book.
While there are many educators out there who believe that a wrong idea, once implanted, is impossible to eradicate, Plait sees it as a teachable opportunity. Take, for example, the commonly held belief that on the Vernal Equinox - and only on the Vernal Equinox - you can balance an egg on its end. Many people believe this, and it's an experiment that's carried out in classrooms around the country every March. Teachers tell their students, and the local news media tell their viewers, but no one stops to ask Why. Why would this day, of all the days in the year, be so special? More importantly, how can we test that assertion?
Fortunately, that's within the powers of any thinking individual, and it should be the first thing teachers do once they've finished having fun balancing eggs: try and do it again the next day. If you can balance an egg on March 30th, or May 22nd or August 12th, or any other day of the year, then you have successfully proven the Equinox Egg Hypothesis wrong. Congratulations! You're doing science!!
Or perhaps you've heard the story that you can see starts from the bottom of a well, or a tall smokestack. This is because, the idea goes, the restricted amount of light will not wash out the stars so much, giving you a chance to do some daytime astronomy. Well, there's an easy way to test this one too, if you have an old factory or something of that nature nearby. What you'll discover is that no matter how much you try to restrict your view of the sky, it'll still be washed out and you won't see any stars at all.
One more good one that a lot of people believe - the moon is larger in the sky when it's near the horizon than when it's at its zenith. Again, this is something that's very easy to test. Go out as the full moon is rising, looming large in the sky, and hold up an object at arm's length - a pencil is usually recommended. Make a note of the moon's apparent size as compared to the eraser. Then go out again when the moon is high in the sky and repeat your observation. The moon appears to be the same size, no matter how it may look to you.
Of course, there's a lot of science into why these things are the way they are. The chicken egg thing is because there's no singular force that is only acting on chicken eggs and only doing so on one day of the year (which is not even universally regarded as the first day of spring). As for the inability to see stars in the daytime, that's because our pesky atmosphere scatters a lot of the light coming from the sun, so light appears to come from everywhere in the sky. The only thing you're likely to see in a blue sky is the moon, and MAYBE Venus, if you're really sharp-eyed and lucky.
The Moon Illusion is not well-understood, actually. It's probably not the brain comparing the moon with objects on the horizon - the effect works at sea, too. It's probably a combination of competing psychological effects that deal with distance, none of which can accurately deal with how far away the moon is.
Regardless, all of these things are easily testable by anyone. The problem is that so few people take that extra time to actually test them., or even think that they should.
There are some myths and misconceptions that take a little more expertise to explain, such as why tides and eclipses happen, how seasons occur and why the moon goes through phases. But these explanations aren't very difficult and are well within the understanding of any intelligent adult. Unfortunately, there are a lot of myths that are stubborn, entrenched into the heads of people everywhere and very hard to get out. Not the least of these are the belief that UFOs are alien spacecraft and that we never went to the Moon.
Interestingly enough, both of these rest on the same basic problem: we can't rely on our own brains to accurately interpret the data that we see. Plait recounts a story where he was mesmerized by some strange lights in the night sky while watching a 3 AM shuttle launch. They seemed to hover in place, making strange noises, and it wasn't until they got much closer that he was able to see them for what they were: a group of ducks that were reflecting spotlights off their feathers.
Our brains believe things, and interpret the observations to fit those beliefs. So when the dust on the moon doesn't behave the way we expect dust to behave, some people believe that to be evidence of fraud, rather than the natural behavior of dust on the moon. We are creatures of story, which is why we like conspiracy theories and astrology. We want the world to make a kind of narrative sense, so often the first explanation we come up with is a story that sounds good. Unfortunately, just because the story sounds good, that doesn't make it true.
He also takes a swipe at bad movie science, but in a good-natured manner. Even he admits that movies are more likely to favor story over science, but there are some common errors that make it into so many science fiction films - sound in space, people dodging lasers, deadly asteroid fields - these things may be dramatically interesting, but they're all bad science. And while it would be annoying and pedantic to pick out every example of how the rules are bent for sci-fi ("Please. Why would the aliens come all the way to Earth to steal water when it exists in abundance out in the Kuiper Belt? I scoff at your attempt!"), they do offer an excellent opportunity to teach people about how science works.
One of the things I've always liked about Plait is his obvious enthusiasm for not just astronomy but for science in general. Here we have this excellent system to cut through the lies our brains tell us and get closer to knowing what's actually going on. Science forces us to question our assumptions, look at things from many points of view, and arrive at a conclusion that best describes the phenomenon we're observing. When Plait talks about science, he is not condescending or dry or super-intellectual, the way so many people imagine scientists to be. He's excited that he gets to use this amazing tool for understanding the universe, and he wants other people to use it.
If you're an astronomy buff, like myself, you probably won't learn much new information from this book. But hopefully you'll be re-invigorated to go out there and look at the world through a scientific, skeptical eye, and you'll be willing to confront these misconceptions when next you come across them. Even better, you might start thinking about what else you think you know, and how you can go about testing it.
---------------------------------------------------
"If a little kid ever asks you just why the sky is blue, you look him or her right in the eye and say, 'It's because of quantum effects involving Rayleigh scattering combined with a lack of violet photon receptors in our retinae.'"
- Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy
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Top reviews from other countries
Neste livro ele desmistifica várias ideias que as pessoas tem sobre astronomia, como o porque temos estações, ou como funciona as forças de maré...
Excelente livro, recomendo pra quem gosta de ciência e astronomia, pra quem consegue ler inglês, é um livro altamente recomendado!
En general muy recomendado si no sabes mucho de astronomía y quieres eliminar algunas cosas que llevan contándote mal desde pequeño.