A Concise History of Solar and Stellar Physics

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Princeton University Press, 2014 M11 28 - 304 pages

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the history of ideas about the sun and the stars, from antiquity to modern times. Two theoretical astrophysicists who have been active in the field since the early 1960s tell the story in fluent prose. About half of the book covers most of the theoretical research done from 1940 to the close of the twentieth century, a large body of work that has to date been little explored by historians.


The first chapter, which outlines the period from about 3000 B.C. to 1700 A.D., shows that at every stage in history human beings have had a particular understanding of the sun and stars, and that this has continually evolved over the centuries. Next the authors systematically address the immense mass of observations astronomy accumulated from the early seventeenth century to the early twentieth. The remaining four chapters examine the history of the field from the physicists perspective, the emphasis being on theoretical work from the mid-1840s to the late 1990s--from thermodynamics to quantum mechanics, from nuclear physics and magnetohydrodynamics to the remarkable advances through to the late 1960s, and finally, to more recent theoretical work. Intended mainly for students and teachers of astronomy, this book will also be a useful reference for practicing astronomers and scientifically curious general readers.

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Contents

Chapter 1 The Age of Myths and Speculations
1
16101910
29
18401910
66
19101940
94
19401970
133
1970
192
Epilogue
247
Appendix A Lanes Fully Convective Gas Spheres
250
Appendix C Ritters Theory of Pulsating Stars
252
Appendix D Radial and Nonradial Stellar Pulsations
254
Appendix E Bohrs Model of the Atom
257
Appendix F Einsteins MassEnergy Relation
260
Appendix G Three Important Nuclear Reactions
263
General Bibliography
265
Index of Names
269
Index of Subjects
277

Appendix B Ritters Polytropic Gas Spheres
251

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About the author (2014)

Jean-Louis and Monique Tassoul received the 2001 Paul and Marie Stroobant Prize of the Académie Royale de Belgique for their work on stellar rotation and stellar stability. From 1968 to 1993, Jean-Louis, whose books include Theory of Rotating Stars (Princeton), was a faculty member of the Physics Department at the Université de Montréal.

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