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Cargando... Asteroids: A History (Smithsonian History of Aviation & Spaceflight Series) (2000)por Curtis Peebles
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. http://nhw.livejournal.com/894197.html This is a good book, but infuriatingly a bit thin on scholarship. There isn't a single reference to any article published in an academic history of science journal. I found this truly bizarre. More than half the references are to articles in Sky and Telescope, which is all very well, but has the academic community working on history of science completely ignored this topic? And perhaps a few references to the primary scientific literature might have been helpful? Having said that, Peebles' heart is clearly in the right place. There's a whole chapter about the politics of street-lighting in San Diego, California, which is of marginal relevance to the history of asteroids but of great interest to those of us interested in the science/politics interface. There's a chapter on the naming of asteroids, which ends with the emphatic statement that "Mr Spock is a mythological figure." There's lots of interesting circumstantial detail on the personalities and life experiences of those who participated in the search for asteroids. The scientific point I was left wondering about was the hardness of the boundaries between asteroids, comets and dwarf planets. The book was published before the recent downgrading of Pluto, but it's pretty clear that Pluto is in the same continuum of objects as Neptune's moon Triton – they just happen to orbit different primaries – and that at the other end of the scale various asteroids are pretty comet-like and vice versa, including the case of Comet Wilson-Harrington, now reclassified as asteroid 4015 Wilson-Harrington. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Asteroids suggest images of a catastrophic impact with Earth, triggering infernos, tidal waves, famine, and death -- but these scenarios have obscured the larger story of how asteroids have been discovered and studied. During the past two centuries, the quest for knowledge about asteroids has involved eminent scientists and amateur astronomers, patient research and sudden intuition, advanced technology and the simplest of telescopes, newspaper headlines and Cold War secrets. Today, researchers have named and identified the mineral composition of these objects. They range in size from 33 feet to 580 miles wide and most are found in a belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Covering all aspects of asteroid investigation, Curtis Peebles shows how ideas about the orbiting boulders have evolved. He describes how such phenomena as the Moon's craters and dinosaur extinction were gradually, and by some scientists grudgingly, accepted as the results of asteroid impacts. He tells how a band of icy asteroids rimming the solar system, first proposed as a theory in the 1940s, was ignored for more than forty years until renewed interest and technological breakthroughs confirmed the existence of the Kuiper Belt. Peebles also chronicles the discovery of Shoemaker-Levy 9, a comet with twenty-two nuclei that crashed into Jupiter in 1994, releasing many times the energy of the world's nuclear arsenal. Showing how asteroid research is increasingly collaborative, the book provides insights into the evolution of scientific ideas and the ebb and flow of scientific debate. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)523.44Natural sciences and mathematics Astronomy Astronomical objects and astrophysics Planets, asteroids and trans-Neptunian objects AsteroidsClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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It covers all aspects from technical to politics and is a real tribute to many dedicated professionals and amateurs astronomers, geologist and other various scientists which are making history in asteroid and comets hunting. It also make me disappointed to know that the Southern hemisphere, were I live, is like a blind concerning the NEOs search effort.
Only one aspect prevent me too score 5 stars: In my opinion, the too long discussion on chapter 8 about he streetlights issue of San Diego.
A wonderful start book for anyone who intend to initiate in the NEOs study. ( )