Book Review - Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End... by Philip Plait
Category Book Review Philip Plait Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End...
Media seems to love stories that involve some astronomical event that threatens wide-spread devastation. The problem is, they never really explain the very small odds of the event actually coming to pass. Philip Plait takes these gloom and doom headlines and humorously (and scientifically) places them in the right context in his book Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End... If you're interested in phenomena like death by gamma-ray bursts or black holes, you'll really enjoy this book (and learn quite a bit in the process).
Contents:
Target Earth: Asteroid and Comet Impacts
Sunburn
The Stellar Fury of Supernovae
Cosmic Blowtorches: Gamma-Ray Bursts
The Bottomless Pits of Black Holes
Alien Attack!
The Death of the Sun
Bright Lights, Big Galaxy
The End of Everything
What, Me Worry?
Acknowledgments
Appendix
index
Plait starts off with things that could conceivably happen. The most likely is the impact of an asteroid on Earth. It's happened before, and it'll happen again. But rather than just bemoan the inevitability of this event, he examines common (and not so common) ways that we might be able to prevent the impact, given enough forewarning. The Hollywood-inspired "blow it up with an atomic bomb" not only turns out to be risky, but there's a very good chance that it would have absolutely no effect whatsoever. On the other hand, it could be very feasible to use a orbiting satellite of a sufficient mass to affect the gravity pull of the asteroid and alter the course just enough that it bypasses earth. He escalates the doomsday scenarios up to the ultimate death of the entire universe. Granted, we're dealing with a lot of conjecture and numbers so large as to boggle the mind, but he does a good job in explaining the strange science that comes into play when quantum physics enters the picture. Of course, by this time, your measly 70 year lifespan wouldn't even register as a nanosecond on the timeline of the universe.
Had this been just raw, hard-core science writing, I don't think it would have much appeal except to other astrophysicists. But Plait injects humor and images to allow those of us without his technical background to at least begin to grasp the possibilities and realities of red supergiants and black holes. Don't let the B-movie sci-fi title fool you into thinking this is something less than it is... a solid scientific (and fun) look at the hostile universe in which we live.
Media seems to love stories that involve some astronomical event that threatens wide-spread devastation. The problem is, they never really explain the very small odds of the event actually coming to pass. Philip Plait takes these gloom and doom headlines and humorously (and scientifically) places them in the right context in his book Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End... If you're interested in phenomena like death by gamma-ray bursts or black holes, you'll really enjoy this book (and learn quite a bit in the process).
Contents:
Target Earth: Asteroid and Comet Impacts
Sunburn
The Stellar Fury of Supernovae
Cosmic Blowtorches: Gamma-Ray Bursts
The Bottomless Pits of Black Holes
Alien Attack!
The Death of the Sun
Bright Lights, Big Galaxy
The End of Everything
What, Me Worry?
Acknowledgments
Appendix
index
Plait starts off with things that could conceivably happen. The most likely is the impact of an asteroid on Earth. It's happened before, and it'll happen again. But rather than just bemoan the inevitability of this event, he examines common (and not so common) ways that we might be able to prevent the impact, given enough forewarning. The Hollywood-inspired "blow it up with an atomic bomb" not only turns out to be risky, but there's a very good chance that it would have absolutely no effect whatsoever. On the other hand, it could be very feasible to use a orbiting satellite of a sufficient mass to affect the gravity pull of the asteroid and alter the course just enough that it bypasses earth. He escalates the doomsday scenarios up to the ultimate death of the entire universe. Granted, we're dealing with a lot of conjecture and numbers so large as to boggle the mind, but he does a good job in explaining the strange science that comes into play when quantum physics enters the picture. Of course, by this time, your measly 70 year lifespan wouldn't even register as a nanosecond on the timeline of the universe.
Had this been just raw, hard-core science writing, I don't think it would have much appeal except to other astrophysicists. But Plait injects humor and images to allow those of us without his technical background to at least begin to grasp the possibilities and realities of red supergiants and black holes. Don't let the B-movie sci-fi title fool you into thinking this is something less than it is... a solid scientific (and fun) look at the hostile universe in which we live.