'A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering In a New Era of Discovery'

Ann Finkbeiner
240 pages | Buy this book

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is a massive telescope that offers unprecedented three-dimensional, shockingly detailed maps of deep space. However, what’s perhaps more remarkable than its eye into the far-flung corners of the universe is the way it came to be. Sloan, which was created in a kind of open-source process, is one of the more fascinating stories in the democratization of science.

What’s the Big Deal?

Optimists expect Sloan will actually be able to trace the universe’s entire history for the first time. Like a kind of time machine, it will look back to the Big Bang and potentially offer insights into how the universe will come to an end. After National Medal of Science recipient Jim Gunn—the maverick cosmologist who led the project—tore up a wad of institutional red tape, the survey was made available and free of charge online. Now regular Joes can discover and name their own stars and galaxies from their own computers.

Buzz Rating: Hum

Specialty magazines are all over the book: Sky and Telescope, Nature, New Scientist, and American Scientists have coverage in the works.

One-Breath Author Bio

Ann Finkbeiner runs the graduate program in science writing at Johns Hopkins University. She wrote After the Death of a Child: Living With Loss Through the Years and The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite.

The Book, in Her Words

“Astronomers don’t have to be hired only at universities rich enough to buy their own telescopes, they don’t have to compete for time at oversubscribed telescopes, they don’t have to worry they’re intruding on claimed territory, they don’t have to find data someone is hoarding. They can sit at their computers wherever in the world they happen to work and ask the archives whatever questions happen to occur to them” (page 168).

Don’t Miss These Bits

1. The “Sloanies” promised that their survey would once and for all solve the problem of structure in the universe by creating an exponentially larger map of the sky with mind-numbing amounts of raw data. The moment of truth came after more than two decades of sweat and research when the team braced for the survey’s first test out of New Mexico’s Apache Point Observatory: “It was operating in fits and starts—parts of the telescope kept breaking, observers ran into problems, the weather was awful—but the data from the camera and spectrographs ran through the photometric and spectroscopic pipelines and out the other end.” Indeed, a new era of discovery had just begun (page 133).

2. Share the knowledge. New discoveries coming out of Sloan made astronomers feel as though they were “drinking out of a firehose.” This revolution—which made the universe available to much more than just geeky elites—increased not only the amount and the flow of information streaming directly from the skies, but also the number of armchair scientists tuning in from around the world.

3. Research has gone viral. “Before Sloan, astronomers were like writers: you think of an idea for a book, you research it, you decide what goes in and what’s left out, you decide the story; it’s yours, you own it.” In this new era, however, researchers are more like Wikipedia editors turning common discoveries into an ever-increasing body of collective knowledge. So long, private ownership of content from outer space! (page 178).

Swipe This Critique

Finkbeiner struggles to deliver a vivid and accessible picture of one of the most exciting scientific discoveries since Galileo, and the flaw lies mainly in the execution: specialized language and a lack of innovation in her approach.

Gradebook

Prose: Too technical. Human anecdotes usually get bogged down by a nebulous parade of quasars and wavelengths.

Construction: It’s an interesting story, albeit told in a square and conventional way.

Bottom Line: An honest, yet not entirely successful, effort to translate scientific terms into everyday language.