NewsHour Backgrounders
June 27, 1997
David Gergen speaks with Timothy Ferris about his book "The Whole Shebang."
July 2, 1997
A look at July 4th landing of the Mars Pathfinder.
April 10, 1997:
Elizabeth Farnsworth glimpses the distant moons of Jupiter.
March 27, 1997:
Jeffrey Kaye explores the excitement over the Hale-Bopp
comet.
Browse the Online NewsHour's science section:
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If you listen to science writer Timothy Ferris, all the secure jobs are up
in the air these days. Way up in the air, that is.
 In
his new book "The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report,"
Ferris points out that over the past 20 years, the number of cosmologists
has grown exponentially; in 1977, there were under a hundred. Now there's
over a thousand due to the phenomenal growth in the study of cosmology,
the branch of astrophysics that studies the origins and structure of
the universe.
Fortunately all these new scientists won't run out of work anytime
soon. Ferris, who is a professor at the University of California at
Berkeley, explains that the boom in cosmologists has resulted in an
expansion of our knowledge of the universe. In 1970, for example, scientists
knew of about 200 galaxies. That figure has now grown to 100,000 galaxies.
And scientists expect that even more exist beyond that. This makes cosmology
the only science that is equal parts imagination and calculation, or
as Ferris writes, "an ongoing story."
 Cosmology
may be an ongoing story, it is no longer science fiction. In "The Whole Shebang," Ferris explores the huge store of concrete knowledge
we do have about the universe, from the Big Bang to Einstein's Theory
of Relativity.
So what exactly is the Big Bang? What does it mean to say that the universe is expanding? How has our understanding of the universe affected law, religion and society? In this Author's Corner, Ferris explains "the whole shebang."
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