rereading it and found even more appreciation for our time and place. I of course have read this book before, but after writing about alot of the intellectual historic highpoints of humanity on my blog, I saw the historical viewpoint that Heinz Pagels presents of William Hershel. The fact that Hershel thought of galaxies and lookback time due to the finite speed of light . . . way back in the 1700's as oppossed to the 1900s makes all of Hershel's astronomy remarkable indeed. People have to realize that mathematical science at the time needed a certain amount of development before it could go much further than what Newton had done in the 1600's - the work of Leonard Euler and his associates. There was literally a hundred years of mathematical development before electromagnetism, chemistry, geology, biology, archaeology, and paleontology became intensive areas of study in the 1800s. But, William Herhsel's astronomy stands out before the 1800s. The book primarilly covers the understanding of astrophysics today; it assumes a knowledge of Galileo, Kepler, and Newtonian physics. and even to a good extent Maxwell's electromagnetism. This book is a good example of how much knowledge and how many books a given person has to go through to see the extent of human knowledge.I don't mean to say that this book has a major flaw; i'm just showing that even it isn't the whole story. The book was a great introductino to the then new inflationary cosmology at the time, and so