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Chargement... The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Bepar Dana Mackenzie
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. I'm not a humongous fan of reading Non-Fiction for pleasure. Non-Fic is to be studied and used in my own creations via notes etc. (or in the past, studied and tests taken on the subjects). That said, when I saw the author, Dana Mackenzie on the TV Show "The Universe" talking about this 'new' theory (hey, it was new to me) that the moon, our moon, was created by a 'great impact', it intrigued me. I realized that I had never really thought about how the moon came to be. I have no doubt that at some point in school we learned something about it, but for the life of me I can't remember when, or which theory we learned. The Big Splat is basically split into four sections. One for each theory. Coaccretion, i.e. the Moon and Earth were formed together from one big mess of primordial gas and dust; capture, i.e. the Moon was minding its own business through our solar system and Earth pulled her in; fission, i.e. the proto-Earth started rotating so fast that it flung off some mass and that eventually became the Moon (wicked big sneeze much?); and Great Impact, where two proto-planets (one bigger than the other) whacked together and the two resulting bodies became Earth and our tidally locked moon. As I read through each theory (by the by, Dana Mackenzie is a fairly good and engaging writer who makes what could be deathly boring info lively and interesting), it only emphasized how little I know about the Moon. After all our parents generation has been there and back and for some reason that, for most of my generation's lives, has been enough for the majority of us. It is slowly changing though, and it's nice to see a book like this that has a pull (really, who could pass by a book called The Big Splat in a book store without taking a look at it). And it's good to know that there are still scientists out there who are still passionate about that thing that appears nearly every night in our sky. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
The first popular book to explain the dramatic theory behind the Moon's genesis This lively science history relates one of the great recent breakthroughs in planetary astronomy-a successful theory of the birth of the Moon. Science journalist Dana Mackenzie traces the evolution of this theory, one little known outside the scientific community: a Mars-sized object collided with Earth some four billion years ago, and the remains of this colossal explosion-the Big Splat-came together to form the Moon. Beginning with notions of the Moon in ancient cosmologies, Mackenzie relates the fascinating history of lunar speculation, moving from Galileo and Kepler to George Darwin (son of Charles) and the Apollo astronauts, whose trips to the lunar surface helped solve one of the most enigmatic mysteries of the night sky: who hung the Moon? Dana Mackenzie (Santa Cruz, CA) is a freelance science journalist. His articles have appeared in such magazines as Science, Discover, American Scientist, The Sciences, and New Scientist. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)523.3Natural sciences and mathematics Astronomy Astronomical objects and astrophysics MoonClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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Moreover, the sheer size and visibility of the Apollo program revived lunar science when it had fallen out of favor with the scientific mainstream and was ebbing.
If the philosophy behind "Cosmos" has become the new, mainstream view of science, "The Big Splat" differs from it in at least one more important way. It does not rely greatly on the common theme of science-versus-religion (though that theme does appear). Science is presented as having its own fashions and dogmas, such as the onetime disinclination to take lunar science seriously, and the widespread prejudice against theories proposing large-scale impacts. The chief prejudice is one against lifeless planets: in the author's words, scientists as well as laymen had always proposed that there was life on the moon because "it was just too hard for the human intellect to grasp a place that was utterly devoid of life."
In Carl Sagan's works, the greatest challenge to the human mind, and the largest opportunity to extend human knowledge, is said to be the possible discovery, by science, of extraterrestrial life. In this book, what is hardest for the human intellect to comprehend is not extraterrestrial life but instead lifelessness: the discovery by Apollo that the moon was and always had been a lifeless body. ( )