A Journey through Time: Exploring the Universe with the Hubble Space Telescope (Penguin Studio Books) by Jay Barbree

by Jay Barbree

Featuring two hundred spectacular full-color photographs, the first pictures from the four-story Hubble Space Telescope provide a dramatic look at the universe over twelve billion years. Tour.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Astronomy

Hardcover

First published November 1, 1995

About the author

Jay Barbree (born 1933) is a correspondent for NBC News, focusing on space travel. Barbree is the only journalist to have covered every manned space mission in the United States, beginning with the first American in space, Alan Shepard aboard Freedom 7 in 1961, continuing through to the latest mission, Atlantis's STS-132 mission in May 2010. Barbree has been present for 132 space shuttle launches, and every launch for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo eras. In total, Barbree has been witness to 163 manned space launches.
Barbree is the author or co-author of seven books, including two memoirs.

Reviews

[Anup Sinha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is THE book for astronomy buffs, at least for novices like myself. It begins close to home with the moon and the solar system and then expands to the Milky Way, other galaxies, and the origins of the universe through the lens of the Hubble Space Telescope. The pictures are outstanding as is the narrative and all the great information. It’s basically a tour of the universe.

Jay Barbree is about the best astronomy writer there is, I came on to this book after reading his outstanding biography of Neil Armstrong. Martin Caidin is an immensely successful science fiction writer and his talents comes through with the entertaining narrative.

Strongly recommended for anyone with similar interest in astronomy.

[J.D. Steens · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book takes the reader through a journey across the cosmos as seen through the Hubble telescope. The pictures are accompanied by interpretive text that places cosmic scale in some perspective: E.g., our star, the sun, consumes 4 billion tons of matter every second for the last 4.6 billion years; two specks of dust within an empty Empire State building represent more crowding than the emptiness of cosmic space; and, putting cosmic time in perspective, the authors remind the reader that even the image of a friend across the room is in the past. This is all good stuff. But the best part of this book is on page one where the first two sentences set the stage for what follows: "Before our universe existed, there was no past, present or future. Space did not exist...." This takes one aback. The book title, "A Journey through Time," takes the reader back to what? A point where there was no time and no space? Then what is time and what is space? How does time stop? How is there no space? Is there an Eternity after all? Time and space seem not to be fundamental categories but rather adjunct phenomena that ride on energy. When energy and mass collapse into the pre-Big Bang singularity (but, the authors write, "no one knows what a mathematical singularity is"), does time stop and space cease to exist until the explosion releases them from their bondage and frees them to move on their cosmic journey? The authors conclude by stating that "nobody knows what lies beyond. They don't know if there is a beyond." The authors do a good job at raising these types of humbling questions and issues.