| THE LIVING COSMOS Our Search for Life in the Universe Chris Impey New York: Random House, December 2007 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-4000-6506-6 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-4000-6506-2 | 393pp. | HC/BWI | $27.95 | |
| Page 33: | "Galaxies are all pulled apart by the expansion, like dots drawn on an inflating balloon." |
| Wording: S/B "are all pulled away from each other by the expansion". |
| Page 42: | "The entire Solar System is twelve miles across—the size of a small town. Notice how empty space is: this small town contains a star the size of a bus at the center, eight planets (none larger than a beach ball), asteroids, and meteors that would be no bigger than specks of dust, and nothing else." |
| This does not seem to include the Oort Cloud, which is said to reach a fair part of the way to the nearest star. |
| Page 43: | "Let's compress time by a factor of fifty thousand trillion (5x10^16). [***] Within three hours of the stroke of midnight, hominids appear for the first time. They are descendants of mammals, who were the successful survivors of a huge meteor impact several days earlier." |
| Let's check the math. That meteor impact happened 65,000,000 years ago: 65x10^6 years, or about 24x10^9 days. Divide that by the time-compression figure, and you get 4.8x10^-7 days, or about 0.04 seconds. |
| Page 56: | "The next step is the key to life. It requires luck and a juggler's skill. Two helium nuclei fuse to make a beryllium nucleus, but beryllium is unstable, and it decays in a tiny fraction of a second. Occasionally, some beryllium survives, and if the energy levels are just right a third helium nucleus is added. Carbon is born." |
| I'd like this better if it said how long the beryllium has to survive. |
| Page 59: | "At the obsessive end of the spectrum, you can buy a watch that connects wirelessly to the master atomic clock at the National Bureau of Standards, so you can plan your day to the nanosecond." |
| This strikes me as over-critical. |
| Page 60: | "The oldest human artifacts are calendar sticks from thirty to forty thousand years ago." |
| This is wrong on two counts. First, the oldest human artifacts are stone cutting tools; second, they date from over two million years ago. The Missouri Museum of Anthropology says: "The Oldowan is the oldest-known stone tool industry. Dating as far back as 2.5 million years ago, these tools are a major milestone in human evolutionary history: the earliest evidence of cultural behavior." |
| Pages 61-2: | "Most modern watches contain tiny quartz tuning forks that vibrate 32,768 times per second." |
| OK, this is correct. But this book has the tiniest commas on the planet. I keep thinking they're periods. |
| Pages 67-68: | "The oldest well-preserved human is a ten-thousand-year-old mummy found in a cave in Nevada." |
| This is essentially true, although the best date I found for the remains indicates an age of 9,400 years. I had thought that Ötzi the iceman was the oldest, and I am not alone in that: "Found with all his clothing and personal effects, Ötzi is the oldest known human mummy, dating back approximately 5300 years." |
| Page 90: | Figure 38 is well-sized, taking up half the page. Some other figures (e.g. 26, 28, 32) are too small to be read easily. |
| I don't know why this should be. |
| Page 101: | "Imagine comparing the DNA of two unrelated people living in the same village anywhere in the world. The typical genetic difference between them is five times greater than that between people plucked from any two places in the world." |
| This is hard to believe. |
| Page 114: | "They had to either adapt to the newly flammable atmosphere or find new environments." |
| "flammable"? |
| Page 115: | "In an environment of low temperature and low water content, fewer free radicals are created, so radiation resistance probably developed as a by-product of adaptation to dessication." |
| Eh? |
| Page 115: | "The discovery of life on Mars might not raise the eyebrow of an extromophile on Earth." |
| But could they make a hook shot with their eyebrow? |
| Page 117: | "Deinococcus radiodurans makes solvents like toluene and heavy metals like mercury harmless..." |
| I'll accept the toluene — but mercury? |
| Page 135: | "Genetically engineered microbes will be able to do hand-to-hand combat with germs and cancer-causing agents." |
| And after they win, they'll raise an eyebrow quizzically as if to say, "What, you didn't think I had it in me?" |
| Page 155: | "...perhaps half a dozen times during each orbit we dip in and out of the disk of the galaxy..." |
| So Duncan Steel understated the number? |
| Pages 185-6: | "Also, a planet of the right mass must be in the slender habitable zone, with a larger Jupiter-like planet farther out to protect from excessive impacts." |
| Missing word: S/B "protect it from excessive impacts". |
| Page 187: | "In our Solar System, the habitable zone extends from 0.7 to 1.3 times the mean Earth-Sun distance (called an astronomical unit, or AU), and it includes just one planet: the Earth." |
| Contradiction: See page 183, where it's stated that "Venus and Mars are in or near the traditional habitable zone...". |
| Page 188: | Figure 78 |
| A great chart, but like some others it is too small for easy reading. |
| Page 201: | "PAHs are found in deep space, so they could have entered the rock as space dust any time during the past 4.5 billion years." |
| Since "the rock" is the Allen Hills meteorite (ALH84001), which is thought to have been on Mars until some ten million years ago, this timing is incorrect. |
| Page 202: | "One scientist has even argued that Viking killed the life it tried to detect..." |
| My guess: this would be Dr. Gilbert Levin. He's not in the index. |
| Page 203: | "Many people sympathise with Agent [Fox] Mulder of TV's The X-Files, who had a poster in his basement office saying 'I want to believe.' (fig 90)." |
| Figure 90 on page 204 is a picture of what had been called by some the "Face on Mars." Mulder's poster appears as Figure 119 on page 270. |
| Page 207: | "We should have known better [about Venus]. Dante told us what to expect in the Divine Comedy. [***] The surface is godforsaken. Condemned sinners have been judged by Minos, and their souls are trapped here forever. There's a violent storm, and the lustful wander in it lost, never to touch one another again. The three-headed dog Cerberus..." |
| It goes on in that vein — really far too fanciful a passage to fit this book. It caused me to raise my eyebrow; but I didn't attempt a hook shot. (But if Venus is Hell, shouldn't Mars be Heaven, as Bradbury said?) |
| Page 220: | "Another quite general way to detect life is to look for enrichment of the rare and heavy form of carbon relative to the normal, lighter form. In photosynthesis, the heavy form is taken up more slowly than the lighter form, leading to a deficit compared to the ratio in sediments without life." |
| Opposite word: S/B "depletion". |
| Page 242: | "Benz works in Bern, proving once again that the Swiss should be known for knuckles and know-how as well as cuckoo clocks and chocolate." |
| I accept the know-how, but "knuckles"? |
| Page 254: | As we learned shockingly with the loss of two space shuttles, chemical rockets are extremely dangerous." |
| No, Doctor. What the deaths of those fourteen brave people told us is that skimpy development funding and bureaucratic management are extremely dangerous. Chemical rockets are dangerous too, of course; almost all vehicles are dangerous in their way. But it was not the inherent dangerousness of chemical rockets that doomed Challenger and Columbia. |
| Page 255: | "An onboard laser would provide the push." |
| How? It sounds like lifting oneself with one's bootstraps. |
| Page 259: | "Commercial jets can already be flown by autopilot and often are—the pilot is there as a placebo." |
| Uh, no. If you think otherwise, you should ask some airline pilots. |
| Page 268: | "Fueled by reruns of the X-Files and Star Trek and by pervasive science fiction in the popular culture, most Americans are convinced that UFOs are examples of alien visitation." |
| I disagree that it's "most Americans". Thirty percent, I might accept — if given some citations. |
| Page 279: | "In the analogy, the product of all the factors gives N = 0.00001." |
| I believe this is off by a factor of ten: s/B "N = 0.0001. He used scientific notation before; he should have done so here. |
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