IN COSMOLOGY, it is often lamented that theorists get all the glory while the hard-working experimentalists get the shaft. Ann Finkbeiner is out to right this wrong in A Grand and Bold Thing, an inside look at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which has created the most comprehensive 3D map of the universe ever made.
Finkbeiner’s story centres on Jim Gunn, the Princeton University astronomer who was awarded the US National Medal of Science in 2008. In the late 1980s, when Gunn began thinking about creating a massive digital survey of the sky, only around 10,000 galaxies had been catalogued. Fast-forward more than a decade,…
