The Historical Quest to Quantify Space

Measuring the Universe

It is one of the great stories of science, and Ferguson tells it well.

Ferguson offers lucid accounts of the reasoning behind important leaps of insight, but it’s the little details that delight.

Ferguson manages to walk us through the most amazing research. She is as interested in the quirky intellectual temperaments of astronomy’s pioneers as in their discoveries.

Modern bookshelves are filled with stories of cosmic discovery. Occasionally, however, an author comes along who dares to describe how science works, who dares to find its underbelly and remind us that the romance and pleasure of cosmic discoveries lies not necessarily in experimental results but in the journey of measurements that led to them. Such an author is Kitty Ferguson, a musician turned science writer, who is distinguished as one who can explain complex things – from the life and times of cosmic objects like black holes to the life and times of cosmic physicists such as Stephen Hawking.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City

Music, more than any of the other arts, is expressed in numbers – measurements of differences in pitch and time. I’m no scientist, but I know what I like, and I found Measuring the Universe exciting, entertaining, and even enthralling.

Ferguson turns men of science into men of fascination.

Ferguson brings a lively, infectiously enthusiastic tone and historical perspective to measuring the universe. A very readable and enjoyable book.

Kitty Ferguson is the author of Tycho and Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership that Forever Changed our Understanding of the Heavens, Prisons of Light: Black Holes and the definitive Stephen Hawking: His Life and Work. She studied at the Juilliard School of Music in New York and was for many years a successful professional musician, conducting and performing oratorio, early music and chamber music. In 1986 she moved to England where her husband was a Visiting Fellow and later Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University. During this and many subsequent periods of residence at Cambridge, Kitty Ferguson audited graduated lectures and seminars in the Department of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics and got to know some of the legendary figures in those fields, including Stephen Hawking. In 1987 she retired from music to devote herself full time to writing about science.

Suppose you and I still wondered whether all of the pinpoints of light in the night sky are the same distance from us. Suppose none of our contemporaries could tell us whether the Sun orbits the Earth, or vice versa, or even how large the Earth is. Suppose no one had guessed there are mathematical laws underlying the motions of the heavens. 
 
How would - how did - anyone begin to discover these numbers and these relationships without leaving the Earth? What made anyone even think it was possible to find out “how far,” without going there? 
In Measuring the Universe we join our ancestors and contemporary scientists as they tease this information out of a sky full of stars. Some of the questions have turned out to be loaded, and a great deal besides mathematics and astronomy has gone into answering them. Politics, religion, philosophy and personal ambition: all have played roles in this drama. 
 
There are poignant personal stories, of people like Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Herschel, and Hubble. Today scientists are attempting to determine the distance to objects near the borders of the observable universe, far beyond anything that can be seen with the naked eye in the night sky, and to measure time back to its origin. The numbers are too enormous to comprehend. 
 
Nevertheless, generations of curious people have figured them out, one resourceful step at a time. Progress has owed as much to raw ingenuity as to technology, and frontier inventiveness is still not out of date.

The Unlikely Partnership that Forever Changed our Understanding of the Heavens

Tycho and Kepler

Kitty Ferguson has written a book that has romance, love, sword fighting, murder, deception, betrayal, trust gone wrong, incredible riches, amazing poverty, reaching for the stars and abject failure... and it’s all one hundred percent true, the most fascinating read about two incredibly interesting people!

Richard Newsome, Book Critic, 612 ABC Brisbane Radio

In Tycho and Kepler, we are given the sense of science as a quintessentially human activity, conducted not by disembodied spirits squirreled away in ivory towers but by living, breathing, and distinctly idiosyncratic subjects.

Ferguson doesn’t short-change her readers on the wonder-working details of 16th century European science and astronomy, which was then still close to alchemy and astrology. She is good on the profound differences in character between the rich, lordly astronomer Brahe and the poverty-stricken, middle-class mathematician Johannes Kepler, the differences between Brahe’s observational and technical obsessions and Kepler’s modest, seemingly simple-minded, genius that nagged at questions we take for granted now but which outraged his contemporaries. By putting together Brahe as Smaug the dragon sitting on a fabulous golden hoard with Kepler as Bilbo Baggins who wrests the treasure from him, and expounding the science with conscientious clarity, Kitty Ferguson has written an absorbing non-fiction fable that simultaneously stimulates our imagination and satisfies our scientific curiosity.

Her skill in explaining complex astronomical problems and procedures clearly and succinctly is nothing short of amazing.

Kitty Ferguson is the author of Measuring the Universe: The Historical Quest to Quantify Space, Prisons of Light: Black Holes and the definitive Stephen Hawking: His Life and Work. She studied at the Juilliard School of Music in New York and was for many years a successful professional musician, conducting and performing oratorio, early music and chamber music. In 1986 she moved to England where her husband was a Visiting Fellow and later Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University. During this and many subsequent periods of residence at Cambridge, Kitty Ferguson audited graduated lectures and seminars in the Department of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics and got to know some of the legendary figures in those fields, including Stephen Hawking. In 1987 she retired from music to devote herself full time to writing about science.

The extraordinary, unlikely tale of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler and their enormous contribution to astronomy and understanding of the cosmos is one of the strangest stories in the history of science. 
 
Kepler was a poor, devoutly religious teacher with a genius for mathematics. Brahe was an arrogant, extravagant aristocrat who possessed the finest astronomical instruments and observations of the time, before the telescope. Both espoused theories that seem off-the-wall to modern minds, but their fateful meeting in Prague in 1600 was to change the future of science. 
 
Set in one of the most turbulent and colourful eras in European history, when medieval was giving way to modern, Tycho and Kepler is a double biography of these two remarkable men.

Black Holes

Prisons of Light

Ferguson succeeds in explaining black holes at a level that will be inviting to those with little or no prior knowledge. Her writing is lucid, her analogies good. Just when you thought it was all over, black holes are back.

An astute blend of entertainment and enlightenment, the sort of book that might have come from George Gamow as part of his series Mr Tompkins in Wonderland. Ferguson’s grip on her material is firm, her style crisp, lucid and lively.

Kitty Ferguson marshals her argument well, taking a bite at a time and giving the reader the opportunity to digest before cramming in the next. Her text is carefully thought out, vivid and accurate. I’m glad I read it.

Roger O-Brien, Journal of the British Astronomical Society

The reader will be amply rewarded not only with knowledge, but also with the humor, fantasy, poetry and awe Ferguson brings to the subject.

Kitty Ferguson is the author of Tycho and Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership that Forever Changed our Understanding of the Heavens, Measuring the Universe: The Historical Quest to Quantify Space, and the definitive Stephen Hawking: His Life and Work. She studied at the Juilliard School of Music in New York and was for many years a successful professional musician, conducting and performing oratorio, early music and chamber music. In 1986 she moved to England where her husband was a Visiting Fellow and later Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University. During this and many subsequent periods of residence at Cambridge, Kitty Ferguson audited graduated lectures and seminars in the Department of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics and got to know some of the legendary figures in those fields, including Stephen Hawking. In 1987 she retired from music to devote herself full time to writing about science.

What is a black hole? Could we survive a visit to one? Perhaps even venture inside? What would we find? Have we yet discovered any real black holes? 
 
And what do black holes teach us about what physicist John Archibald Wheeler called “the deep, happy, mysteries of the universe”? 
 
These are just a few of the tantalizing questions examined in this jargon-free review of one of the most fascinating topics in modern science. In search of the answers, we trace a star from its birth to its death throes, take a fabulous hypothetical journey to the border of a black hole and beyond, spend time with some of the world’s leading theoretical physicists and observational astronomers scanning the cosmos for evidence of real black holes, and take a whimsical look at some of the wild ideas black holes have inspired.

Kitty Ferguson

A Life Well Lived

In 1963 Stephen Hawking was given two years to live. Defying all the odds, he died in March 2018 at age seventy-six as the most celebrated scientist in the world. This carefully researched and updated biography and tribute gives a rich picture of Hawking's remarkable life - his childhood, the heart-rending beginning of his struggle with motor neurone disease, his ever-increasing international fame, and his long personal battle for survival in pursuit of a scientific understanding of the universe. 
 From more recent years, Kitty Ferguson describes his inspiring leadership at the London Paralympic Games, the release of the film The Theory of Everything, his continuing work on black holes and the origin of the universe, the discovery of 'supertranslations', and the astounding 'Starshot' program. Here also are his intense concern for the future of the Earth and his use of his celebrity to fight for environmental and humanitarian causes, and, finally, a ground-breaking paper he was working on at the time of his death, in which he took issue with some of his own earlier theories. Throughout, Ferguson summarizes and explains the cutting-edge science in which Hawking was engaged and offers vivid first-hand descriptions of his funeral in Cambridge and the interment of his ashes in Westminster Abbey. 
This is an amazing and revealing tribute, assessing Hawking's legacy in and out of science.

Kitty Ferguson

Books by Kitty Ferguson

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