The book of the cosmos: imagining the universe from Heraclitus to Hawking

Introduction: Telescopes for the Mind

Pt. 1. Cosmological Origins

1. We Have Seen But Few of His Works: Torah, Sacred Poetry, Apocrypha, New Testament

2. Twice into the Same River? / Heraclitus and Parmenides

3. Things of the Universe Are Not Sliced Off with a Hatchet / Empedocles and Anaxagoras

4. Atoms and Empty Space / Leucippus, Democritus and Epicurus / [et al.]

5. Moving Image of Eternity / Plato

6. Potency of Place / Aristotle

7. He Supposes the Earth to Revolve / Aristarchus and Archimedes

8. Geometrical Argument / Eratosthenes

9. No Erratic or Pointless Movement / Cicero

10. Turning the Universe Upside Down / Plutarch

Pt. 2. Ptolemy, Middle Earth, Middle Ages

11. Peculiar Nature of the Universe / Claudius Ptolemy

12. Weaknesses of the Hypotheses / Proclus

13. Their Peculiar Behavior Confounds Mortals' Minds / Martianus Capella / Boethius

14. We Consider Time a Thing Created / Moses Maimonides

15. From This Point Hang the Heavens / Dante Alighieri

16. If a Man Were in the Sky and Could See the Earth Clearly / Nicole Oresme

17. Single Universe in Which Each Star Influences Every Other / Nicholas Cusanus

Pt. 3. Copernicus to Newton

18. Almost Contrary to Common Sense / Nicholas Copernicus

19. Poetic Structure of the World / Fernand Hallyn and Thomas Kuhn

20. This Art Unfolds the Wisdom of God / John Calvin and Johannes Kepler

21. Star Never Seen Before Our Time / Tycho Brahe

22. This Little Dark Star Wherein We Live / Thomas Digges

23. Innumerable Suns, and an Infinite Number of Earths / Giordano Bruno

24. Neither Known Nor Observed by Anyone Before / Galileo Galilei

25. Galileo and the Geometrization of Astronomical Space / Samuel Edgerton

26. This Boat Which Is Our Earth / Johannes Kepler

27. Two Books of God Agree With Each Other / Tommaso Campanella

28. They Hoist the Earth Up and Down Like a Ball / Robert Burton

29. World in the Moon / John Wilkins

30. Very Liquid Heaven / Rene Descartes

31. Eternal Silence of These Infinite Spaces / Blaise Pascal

32. This Pendent World / John Milton

33. But One Little Family of the Universe / Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle and Aphra Behn

34. Into the Celestial Spaces / Isaac Newton

35. Discernible Ends and Final Causes / Richard Bentley

36. Planetarians, and This Small Speck of Dirt / Christiaan Huygens

Pt. 4. Unfurling Newton's Universe

37. Signal of God / William Derham

38. Beautiful Pre-established Order / Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Samuel Clarke

39. Event So Glorious to the Newtonian Doctrine to Gravity / Edmond Halley / Astrophilus

40. Voice from the Starry Heavens / Cotton Mather

41. This Most Surprising Zone of Light / Thomas Wright of Durham

42. How Fortunate Is This Globe! / Immanuel Kant

43. To Become Adequately Copernican / Johann Heinrich Lambert

44. Laboratories of the Universe / William Herschel

45. As Certain as the Planetary Orbits / Pierre Simon Laplace

46. Intelligence of the Watch-Maker / William Paley

47. Must We Then Reject the Infinitude of the Stars? / H. W. M. Olbers

48. Great Principle That Governs the Universe / Mary Fairfax Somerville

49. Unfailing Connection and Course of Events / Alexander von Humboldt

50. Primordial Particle / Edgar Allan Poe

51. Shadow! The Shadow! / Maria Mitchell

52. Unraveled Starlight / William Huggins

53. Astronomy Still Young / Agnes Mary Clerke

Pt. 5. Universe Re-imagined

54. Peculiar Interest of Mars / Giovanni Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell

55. Cosmical Evolution / G. H. Darwin

56. Cosmos Without Peer and Without Price / G. K. Chesterton

57. Curved Space and Poetry of the Universe / Robert Osserman

58. Man in the Accelerated Chest / Albert Einstein

59. It Is Not True That "All Is Relative" / Richard Feynman

60. Spacetime Tells Matter How to Move / John Archibald Wheeler

61. Architecture of the Celestial Mansions / Annie Jump Cannon

62. Quickening Influence of the Universe / Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

63. You Have Broken Newton's Back / George Bernard Shaw

64. Realm of the Nebulae / Edwin Hubble

65. Driven to Admit Anti-Chance / Arthur Eddington

66. Did the Expansion Start from the Beginning? / Georges Edouard Lemaitre

67. This Big Bang Idea / Fred Hoyle

Pt. 6. Beginnings and Ends

68. Incomprehensible Magnitude, Unimaginable Darkness / Werner Gitt

69. That All-But-Eternal Crimson Twilight / Arthur C. Clarke

70. Cosmic Oasis / Hans Blumenberg

71. Very Womb of Life / James Lovelock

72. Urge to Trace the History of the Universe / Steven Weinberg

73. To Transform the Universe on a Cosmological Scale / John Barrow and Frank Tipler

74. No Boundary Condition / Stephen Hawking

75. Prisons of Light / Kitty Ferguson

76. Very Lumpy Universe / George Smoot

77. Cosmic Archipelago / Martin Rees

78. Cosmological Natural Selection / Lee Smolin

79. Ultimate Free Lunch / Alan Guth

80. Was There a Big Bang? / David Berlinski

81. What We Cannot See and Yet Know Must Be There / Vera Rubin

82. Their Extravagant Smallness / Freeman Dyson and Brian Greene

83. Cosmic Dust-Bunnies / John S. Lewis

84. Mystery at the End of the Universe / Paul Davies

85. Do the Heavens Declare? / Owen Gingerich.