Читать книгу Astrobiology - Charles S. Cockell - Страница 9

This textbook has been enormous fun to write and a pleasure to update. It could not have been done without help from many people. I am grateful to colleagues for reading chapters and providing general and specific feedback on their content, readability, and style. I am particularly grateful to those whom I acknowledged in the first edition of the textbook, the edition from which this version has been built. I would also like to acknowledge the thoughtful and very helpful review comments of Ania Losiak, Rosa Santomartino, Annemiek Waajen, Stewart Gault, Rosie Cane, Peter Higgins, and Kate Haigh.

I would like to give special thanks to all the undergraduate students of the Astrobiology course at the University of Edinburgh (PHYS08051) that I have taught since 2013. It is their views, perspectives, and insights that led to the structure of this textbook when it was first written, and that have improved the content and structure in this second edition. Some subjects seem important, but turn out to be less useful as a way to teach concepts when exposed to the enquiring eyes of undergraduates. Other information seems tangential, but something about it makes it useful to get across certain ideas and knowledge. So I am immensely grateful to all the undergraduates who have patiently sat in lectures year after year and have honed my knowledge of what works and what doesn't. I would like to thank the University of Edinburgh and the School of Physics and Astronomy for the opportunity to teach astrobiology.

Further refinements in the content and level of the book have been made based on the feedback and opinions of over 150 000 students who have taken part in our “Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life” Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) since it was offered online in 2012. I have not had direct face-to-face teaching contact with them, but in the online forums, their views on the teaching material have been valuable.

I hope that other students interested in astrobiology, and indeed anyone else interested in the subject, can gain the vicarious benefit of the collected experience of these students through this textbook.

Some of the images in the book were kindly provided by friends and colleagues, including Steve Benner, Hailiang Dong, Ralf Kaiser, Jonathan Clarke, and Victor Tejfel. I would like to thank the journal Astrobiology for permission to reproduce images.

Any errors in the textbook are entirely my responsibility. If you see any, or disagree with any statements, please do get in contact.

I would very much like to thank the team at Wiley-Blackwell, particularly Sonali Melwani, for seeing this book through into the second edition. It has been a pleasure to work with Wiley-Blackwell.

Charles S. Cockell