Seeing and Believing

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"Seeing and Believing" tells the story, visionary by visionary and discovery by discovery, of the telescope, one of the few inventions that have revolutionized our view of the universe and how we fit into it. In the tradition of Dava Sobel's "Longitude," "Seeing and Believing" focuses on the often larger-than-life figures whose insights and breakthroughs made our cosmological odyssey possible - from Galileo himself to William Herschel, the musician-turned-astronomer who discovered Uranus, to George Ellery Hale, who regularly conversed with an elf yet managed nonetheless to found both the Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar observatories. But the most fascinating character of all is the telescope itself, which, designed solely to help us determine our place in the scheme of things, is an evolving metaphor for how we see ourselves.