| HOW IT ENDS From You To the Universe Chris Impey New York: W. W. Norton and Company, March 2010 |
Rating: 4.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-393-06985-3 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0393-06985-0 | 352pp. | HC/BWI | $26.95 | |
| Pages 34-35: | "Only lens cells inside the eye and the neurons of the cerebral cortex seem be inert..." |
| Missing word: S/B "seem to be". |
| Page 40: | "The conclusions on this page, and indeed all of Chapter 1, belie the chapter's opening anecdote, which implies the existence of a mind apart from the body." |
| The chapter concludes there is no evidence for a soul. I also believe this. |
| Page 46: | "In the United States, as in the rest of the industrialized world, cholera and smallpox are now unheard of." |
| Smallpox is unheard of throughout the world; it was eradicated in 1979 (although samples of the virus are preserved.) Cholera, however, exists in the United States because travellers bring it back from elsewhere. A Florida woman was diagnosed in late 2010 after visiting Haiti, where the disease is epidemic due to the recent earthquake. |
| Page 48: | "In Russia, men rank 166th in the league table..." |
| What is this league table? It is never described. |
| Page 49: | "Some cold, hard facts: Cold is more dangerous than heat. [***] Coconuts are more dangerous than sharks." |
| I think these "cold, hard facts" do not bear close examination. Cold is more dangerous than heat because our environment is generally closer to the lowest temperature we can tolerate. That may well change. |
| Page 55: | "Turtles have the ability to control the pace of their metabolism. If they didn't succumb to disease or predation they might not age." |
| The second statement does not follow from the first. Also, aging occurs independent of predation — and probably of disease, a case Impey himself makes. Finally, as a scientist he should support this assertion with evidence. |
| Page 61: | "Cancer cells proliferate by shutting off the mitochondria so the self-destruct mechanism is disabled..." |
| Right: They live by shutting down the cell's energy factory. |
| Page 78: | "Researchers have recently discovered that the energy required to create a new species is a fixed quantity." |
| Really? Again, citation missing. |
| Page 81: | "Davis points out that we're blithely ignoring or being falsely reassured about the carcinogenic properties of ingredients in soda and makeup and over-the-counter drugs." |
| Really? I drink a lot of soda. |
| Page 84: | "Nuclear weapons release energy with millions of times more efficiency than the chemical energy behind all other types of explosion." |
| Word choice: S/B "millions of times more intensity". |
| Page 92: | "The vertebrate eye with its back-to-front wiring and blind spot is a good example." |
| "Back-to-front wiring"? |
| Page 98: | "Probably his biggest achievement as a young physician was being part of the team that eradicated smallpox." |
| See page 46. |
| Page 101: | "Nobody knows what these genes [microcephalin and ASPM] are for..." |
| See page 77, where Impey states that the microcephalin gene regulates brain size. |
| Page 105: | "Joy was the primary author of the UNIX operating system..." |
| Dennis Ritchie would be very surprised. |
| Page 113: | "The conventional wisdom also held that water was mostly delivered by a late epoch of bombardment by asteroids and meteors..." |
| No comets? Compare page 137. |
| Page 116: | "Rocks from the Issua formation in Greenland show an uptake rate of radioactive carbon that's suggestive of a metabolism at work 3.85 billion years old, just after the end of the heavy bombardment." |
| Word choice: S/B "3.85 billion years ago". |
| Page 118: | "Imagine jumping into a pleasantly cool swimming pool on a warm summer's day. Next, imagine that the pool is filled with water near the boiling point, or just above freezing. Now imagine the pool has been filled with vinegar or household ammonia or drain cleaner or brine or battery acid. In all cases but the first, you'd be in trouble in seconds and dead not long after." |
| The idea is great, but these example environments are carelessly chosen. It wouldn't take a whole lot of money to induce me to jump into a pool of brine, or vinegar, or household ammonia and stay one minute — provided a shower of clean water was waiting. The latter two are weak solutions of acetic acid and ammonia, respectively. OK, drain cleaner (lye, or sodium hydroxide) and batttery acid are worse, but still not good examples of extreme environments. Indeed, only the boiling or freezing water is bad enough that no amount of money would persuade me. |
| Page 119: | "Passing through the abandoned village of Yungay, the landscape looks utterly barren." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "Beyond the abandoned village of Yungay". |
| Page 125: | "Land vegetation extracts carbon dioxide from the air when soil weathers." |
| I don't see the connection. |
| Page 127: | "In negative feedback, a signal fed back into a system is reduced or canceled so that change is minimized." |
| This is a poor description of negative feedback. It should say that the output of the system is reduced or cancelled. The description of positive feedback has the same fault. |
| Page 128: | "It has never been clear how natural selection could operate at the level of a planet so this 'strong' form of Gaia isn't widely accepted." |
| I can think of ways. They involve the concept of panspermia, which Impey introduces on pages 153-6. But why is it vital to acceptance of Gaia? |
| Page 131: | "...a spectrum of Earth taken by the Galileo probe as it headed for the outer planets (Figure 5.5)". |
| The caption of Figure 5.5 (page 132) says the data were obtained by Mars Global Surveyor. |
| Page 133: | "And so the oxygen 'revolution' is underway." |
| Missing space: S/B "under way". |
| Page 134: | "In nature's roll of the dice, most large reptiles are obliterated by the force of the impact, or by the earthquakes and tidal waves it unleashes." |
| This is not an accurate picture of the destruction of the dinosaurs by the Chicxulub impact. If that impact's shock wave, and the resulting earthquakes and tsunamis, were globally lethal, no land animals large or small would have survived. Experts agree it was the longer-term effects (cosmic winter, acid rain) killing their food supply that doomed the dinos.1 |
| Page 137: | "This sounds very esoteric and abstract, but interstellar debris is real." |
| Certainly it is, but I question whether it is the source of the hundred tons that Impey says rain down on Earth each day. |
| Page 139: | "Projectiles five meters across arrive about once a month and release energy equal to the Nagasaki atomic bomb when they explode in the upper atmosphere. The public is unaware of these blasts but the U. S. Air Force tracks them with the satellites deployed to look for violations of the ban on testing nuclear weapons. Declassified documents show 136 atmospheric explosions between 1975 and 1992, in line with astronomical projections." |
| If "once a month" is accurate, there should have been 204 impacts during the 17-year period specified. Also, it's hard to be unaware of a 21-kiloton explosion taking place overhead, even high up. Consider how many people report bright meteors. |
| Page 145: | Describing the simulated impact of a 10-km asteroid on Los Angeles: "The fireball is 100 times larger and 1000 times brighter than the Sun." |
| Word choice: S/B "appears". (Just for pedants.) |
| Page 149: | "We've see that the biosphere is pervasive, robust, and durable." |
| Typo: S/B "seen". |
| Page 157: | "This rock is special because its path in time and space intercept the location of Earth a million orbits later." |
| Number: S/B "intercepts". |
| Page 159: | "...a large moon to stabilize the orbit, sufficient water, and plate tectonics." |
| Close, but no cigar. What Ward and Brownlee argue is that the moon should stabilize the planet's obliquity, the wobble of its axis of rotation. |
| Page 168: | "...each large planet holds an energy source in the radioactive decay of heavy elements deep in its core." |
| I suppose the correctness of this turns on which elements are "heavy elements." Potassium-40 provides much of the heat in Earth's core, but potassium is not what I think of as a heavy element. A cosmologist may have a different view. |
| Page 171: | Figure 7.4 shows the relative sizes of habitable zones for several stars. |
| Is this meaningful? It's purely qualitative, and the Sun is not among the stars represented. |
| Page 171: | "But it turns out that stars migrate substantially in radius within the Galaxy over billions of years so the galactic habitable zone can't be a hard constraint." |
| Word Choice: S/B "migrate to or away from galactic center" or similar. |
| Page 178: | "The flashes were so brief and had to accurately locate in the sky that it took thirty years to solve the puzzle..." |
| Spelling: S/B "hard to accurately locate". |
| Page 182: | "...Baliunas embodies some interesting questions about the progress of science: How often are scientists influenced by political ideology when they interpret data? Isn't it healthy to have prevailing explanations subject to skepticism?" |
| Isn't it also healthy for scientists to stop beating their wives? The real question about Sallie Baliunas is why her ideas about climate science should deserve any credibility. You might as sensibly insist that the Sun is warmer without sunspots, when observation shows the opposite to be true. Impey reports this on page 186. |
| Page 187: | Figure 8.1 shows global temperature trends over the past 5.5 million years, based on 57 deep-sea cores. |
| This apparently shows the globe cooling by about 6°C during that period. So much for global warming, eh? In any case, the plot covers too long a period to show Milankovich cycles clearly, defeating its intent. |
| Page 206: | "The Galaxy presents an almost unchanging tableau. We can't see rotation or evolution and each type of celestial object seems distinct and unique." |
| Missing word: S/B "see its rotation or evolution". |
| Page 209: | "He [Herschel] estimated the Milky Way to be 8000 light-years across and 1500 light-years thick..." |
| A neat trick in the 1700s, before the speed of light was known. But I assume Impey translated Herschel's actual dimensions into light-years for convenience of the reader. |
| Pages 218-9: | "Dubinski used all 1152 processors of a machine called Blue Horizon at the San Diego Computer Center to follow 150 million stars in each galaxy." |
| Figure 9.4 (page 220) says he used "the fastest computer in Canada." |
| Page 221: | "During the first enc ounter..." |
| Extra space: S/B "encounter". |
| Page 237: | "The central black hole, currently 'only' 4 million solar masses strong, will grow into a beast of 10 billion solar masses." |
| It's unclear whether this is with or without Andromeda's black hole. (The merger of Andromeda with our Milky Way galaxy was discussed earlier.) |
| Page 255: | "The Milky Way is a twisting spiral about 300 meters across and the nearest comparable galaxies are about a kilometer distant." |
| If the nearest comparable galaxy is Andromeda (M31), the math doesn't work out because the Milky Way is 100,000 LY across and M31 is over 2 million LY away. |
| Page 260: | "...and several experiments are underway to directly detect this major component of the universe." |
| Missing space: S/B "under way". |
| Page 262: | "All we really know is that there is a force that behaves like antigravity or gas with negative pressure..." |
| Sorry: a "gas with negative pressure" would suck, not blow. |
| Page 315: | Note 2: "There is no explanation for the transition 3 million years ago from erratic variations to the two major cyclic imprints." |
| Perhaps, that far back, diffusion erases the isotope ratios on which the data are based. |
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