Twenty years ago, the science writer Dennis Overbye published a marvellous book, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, in which he traced the development of cosmology - the scientific study of the universe as a whole - during the second half of the 20th century. The cosmologists in Overbye's book were lonely for two reasons. They included the last remnants of a generation of astronomers who, before large groups of collaborators and automated data collection had become routine, used to sit up all night, alone, under unheated domes, squinting through huge telescopes to catch the faintest glimpses of light from faraway galaxies. And for much of the period that Overbye covered, the field of cosmology hung on the margins of respectability among physicists, a neglected stepchild in the shadow of such flashy fields as high-energy particle physics, with its hulking accelerators and skyrocketing budgets.

LRB 17 February 2011 | PDF Download