Goldsmith, Donald

• Einstein's Biggest Blunder?

  • The subtitle of this book is "The Cosmological Constant and Other Universal Fudge Factors", which is a bit misleading since a vast majority of the book is essentially a summary of a semester-long course on stellar and galactic astronomy with more weight thrown into cosmology and less into stars. If you really want to learn Astronomy, you'd probably be better off reading a proper introductory textbook (expensive, but easy to find at libraries), a genre in which Goldsmith is also an author. In the most crucial section of the book, on cosmology and inflation, I didn't think Goldsmith did a very good job of presenting analogies and explanations that made the problem clear. In some cases, it was too simplistic. In others, there was enough detail thrown in that I felt like I was reading a technical paper on the subject. Basically, it is hard to strike the right balance on this subject, and Goldsmith just doesn't have the proper format to try it (it requires a lot of figures and asides, like in a textbook).

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