Alan Hirshfeld is Professor of Physics at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and an Associate of the Harvard College Observatory. He received his undergraduate degree in astrophysics from Princeton University in 1973 and his Ph.D. in astronomy from Yale University in 1978. His widely praised book Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos, published in 2002 by Henry Holt & Co., chronicles the human stories involved in the centuries-long quest to measure the first distance to a star.

A past winner of a Griffith Observatory/Hughes Aircraft Co. national science writing award, he is currently working on a popular biography of 19th-century scientists Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, to be published by Walker and Co. Publishers in 2005. He is co-editor of Sky Catalogue 2000.0. His three-part series on the history of observational astrophysics is currently featured in Sky & Telescope magazine. Other writings have appeared numerous places, including the Astrophysical Journal, Boston Globe, BBC History magazine, The Mathematics Teacher, Isis, and American Scientist.

He currently serves on the advisory board of the American Astronomical Society's Historical Astronomy Division and was named in 2003 to MIT's Distinguished Lecturer Series.

In 19th-century England, an unschooled bookbinder named Michael Faraday overcame almost impossible economic and class obstacles to become the greatest experimental scientist of all time. Faraday sought to understand the natural world in the belief that the revealed knowledge would nourish the collective soul of humanity. His legacy is nothing less than our own technological society.

To read and/or print the complete essay please click on one of the options below:

Printer Friendly Version
Acrobat Reader