[meteorite-list] Review of Alan Rubin's book

From: Matson, Robert <ROBERT.D.MATSON_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 09:52:06 2004
Message-ID: <AF564D2B9D91D411B9FE00508BF1C86901B4E2AA_at_US-Torrance.mail.saic.com>

Hi All,

Over the weekend I finished reading Alan Rubin's new (and first) book,
_Disturbing the Solar System: Impacts, Close Encounters, and Coming
Attractions_, and thought I'd post a little review here. This book covers
an extremely diverse (but interrelated) range of topics, including solar
system evolution, orbital resonances, mass extinctions, asteroids,
meteorites, tektites, craters, volcanism, plate tectonics, magnetic pole
reversals, planetary rings, moons, comets, the evolution of life, and even
Drake's Equation and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. No
matter how broad your background might be in astronomy, physics,
chemistry and biology, you are still likely to find a few topics or theories
in this book that you've never been exposed to before.

For me, I'd never made the connection that domesticatable animals
might be a requirement for a technologically advanced civilization.
And while I'd read a number of books (both fictional and non-fictional)
suggesting that life might not have evolved if it weren't for our planet's
large moon, I had not previously read that the Moon stabilizes the
tilt of the earth's axis. I certainly knew about the Moon's role in
nutation
of the earth's axis, but was not aware that French astronomers had
recently performed a computer simulation of what would happen to
the earth's axis over time if the Moon were absent. (Gravitational
interaction between the planets and earth's equatorial bulge would
cause the obliquity of the ecliptic to vary chaotically over relatively
small time periods -- millions of years. Such unstable seasons would
lead to extreme global climatic fluctuations, making it much more
difficult for life to establish itself.)

As you might expect, there are many dozens of photographs, diagrams,
graphs and illustrations scattered throughout. Indeed, this is the first
book I've ever seen that contained pictures of the plaque aboard the
Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, the pictogram sent out by the Arecibo
dish back in 1974 toward M13, photographs of crater chains on Callisto
and the Moon, and a table of all the magnetic pole reversals -- all in
one place. It will make a nice reference book whenever I need to find
something fast.

There is a fairly extensive 18-page glossary covering most of the
technical terms in the book, and there are also 10 pages of chapter
by chapter references for additional reading. Alan obviously spent
a lot of time putting all of this together. Given how busy he is
at UCLA, he must have spent a lot of nights over the years working
on this project.

Of course, in any technical book there are bound to be typos and errors,
though I found very few. Page 94, for instance, has a confusing phrase
"...gravitational resonance between the Moon and the debris disk..." I
believe he meant ~earth~ and the debris disk. The most glaring mistake
I found is that Figure 11.2 on pg. 164 is misidentified as being a partial
eclipse of the earth when it is merely a crescent earth. There are a
couple of minor errors in the glossary -- see if you can spot the problems
with the definitions of arcsecond and parsec.

Overall, the book is well-written in plain English that you don't need
a PhD is astrodynamics to understand. I highly recommend it to anyone
who wants to expand their appreciation of just how fortunate we are to
be alive on this little blue ball.

Cheers,
Rob
Received on Wed 07 Aug 2002 07:19:57 PM PDT