About this item
A sweeping inquiry into how the night sky has shaped human history . For as long as humans have lived, we have lived beneath the stars. But under the glow of today's artificial lighting, we have lost the intimacy our ancestors once shared with the cosmos. . In Starborn, cosmologist Roberto Trotta reveals how stargazing has shaped the course of human civilization. The stars have served as our timekeepers, our navigators, our muses - they were once even our gods. How radically different would we be, Trotta also asks, if our ancestors had looked up to the night sky and seen ... nothing? He pairs the history of our starstruck species with a dramatic alternate version, a world without stars where our understanding of science, art, and ourselves would have been radically altered.
About the Author
Roberto was born and grew up in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland. After obtaining an MSc(hons) in Physics from ETH Zurich and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Geneva, he moved to Oxford where he was the Lockyer Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society at Oxford University, and a Junior Fellow of St Anne's, before being appointed as a Lecturer at Imperial in 2008, where is is now Professor of Astrostatistics in the Physics Department. Roberto is a science communicator and a Visiting Professor of Cosmology at Gresham College, London. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his research, outreach and teaching, including the Lord Kelvin Award of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (2007) , the Michelson Prize of Case Western Reserve University (2008) , a President's Award for Excellence in Teaching (2016) and a President's Leadership Award for Excellence in Societal Engagement (2018) at Imperial College London. In 2019, he was awarded the Georges Lemaitre Chair of the University of Louvaine. His award-winning first book for the public, "The Edge of the Sky: All you need to know about the All-There-Is", endeavours to explain the Universe using only the most common 1,000 words in English. Roberto was named as one of the 100 Global Thinkers 2014 by Foreign Policy magazine (Nov 2014) , for "junking astronomy jargon". He is a co-founder and director at Data Fusion Consultants, offering statistical consultancy and custom-made data analysis solutions. He works as a scientific consultant with museums, writers, film makers and artists, providing the help and support they need to make their artistic creations scientifically sound.
