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Summary: A great description of science from the inside
Review: This is one of the best science books I have ever read, and a great description of how science works from the inside. Scientists aren't impartial godlike figures, they're human beings just like the rest of us.This book details how a geologist, by bringing his father an interesting rock--a polished specimen that included the K-T boundary layer, deposited when the dinosaurs all vanished--started a controversy that revolutionized and redefined the entire field of earth sciences. Personally, I love it when that happens, that's how science is supposed to work, but people who have built their entire careers on the old view of things can have a very difficult time accepting a new paradigm, and will go to ludicrous extremes to defend the old one to their dying breath. The impact theory of extinctions is one of the scariest concepts I have ever come across, but I am a lot happier knowing how things really work. This is an utterly fascinating read, and I can't recommend it strongly enough. To anyone interested in geology, astronomy, dinosaurs, (who isn't interested in dinosaurs??), or the workings of science, I can only say---READ THIS BOOK!!!!
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Summary: A fascinating case history of how science really works.
Review: This well-written book provides a complete and interesting account of how a brilliant and insightful father-son team scratched their heads, followed their instincts, and opened up a new window of understanding on the processes that have shaped the geological and biological history of the planet. The science itself is well-conveyed. Even the nonscientist will follow the compelling evidence that a large impact occured 65 million years ago in what is now the Yucatan. An impact of this magnitude would lead to such global devastation of the ecosystem that extinction of most forms of terrestrial life would seem an inevitable outcome. The disappearance of the dinosaurs during this same geological blink of an eye, after a reign of over 150 million years, is not plausibly coincidental.While the science in the book is fascinating, the work is most significant for the insight that it provides into the process of the scientific enterprise. In art, music, and literature, value is fundamentally a matter of taste. In science, on the other hand, nature has the final say as to the ultimate value of an idea. A "more correct" idea should eventually win out over a "less correct" idea, regardless of the prejudices of the people involved. "Night Comes to the Cretaceous" is a testament to that process. The book tells the tale of how an originally unlikely idea successfully faced the challenges of experiment and observation, and in the process displaced scientific orthodoxy. It also tells the very human story of how honest, healthy skepticism on the part of a number of established scientists gradually became instead the unreasoned and sometimes vindictive attacks of those who had been left behind by the advance of knowledge. One of the most influential books about the history and philosophy of science is Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." In some ways Powell does the job better, simply by providing a blow by blow account of a current-day scientific revolution centering on one of most compelling and generally accessible scientific questions of our time: "Whatever happened to the dinosaurs?"
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Summary: The crater of the red devil
Review: What caused the great terminal Cretaceous extinction of both land and sea species, including the dinosaurs? Does the huge crater buried under half a mile of sedimentary rock on the Yucatán Peninsula have anything to do with the demise of Tyrannosaurus Rex, along with seventy percent of all species that were alive during the last days of its reign? “Night Comes to the Cretaceous” answers both questions, the latter with an emphatic ‘yes!’ The Chicxulub (which means either ‘red devil’ or ‘place of the cuckold’ in Mayan) impact crater, first reported (and ignored for a decade) at the 1981 annual meeting of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, appears to exactly the right age and the right size to have terminated most of the life on Earth, sixty-five million years ago. This fascinating book by geologist James Lawrence Powell is the first I’d read on the subject of mass extinctions since “Extinction” by Steven M. Stanley, published in 1987. What a difference two decades of discoveries made! Stanley, although aware of the discovery of the iridium concentrations at the K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) boundary, concluded that global climatic change rather than extraterrestrial catastrophe caused mass extinctions. Chicxulub was not on his event horizon, so he produced a very detailed and convincing argument for what was then the orthodox theory of extinction. Unfortunately for orthodoxy, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez and his son, geologist Walter Alvarez had already discovered the asteroid-impact iridium layer in 1980, and predicted the discovery of Chicxulub as the death-knell of the dinosaurs. Powell in “Night Comes to the Cretaceous” details many more discoveries that supported the Alvarez theory of extinction, and changed the way scientists (and the rest of us) look at the night sky. His book provides a comprehensive overview of all the bits and pieces of the dinosaur extinction puzzle that I had been reading about in two decades of science magazines. It is really exciting to see the whole picture and the new orthodoxy as of 1998. Furthermore, in the last few chapters of his book, Powell asks whether all mass extinctions on Earth were caused by asteroid/comet impacts. He lists the seven known mass extinctions and presents the impact evidence for each. Finally he discusses the theory that cratering and extinctions may be regularly spaced through time. ‘Night’ is pretty scary reading if you had planned to go out with a whimper, not a bang.
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Summary: What's That Up In The Sky?
Review: __________________ This book is an excellent summary of the K-T impactor theory and is highly recommended. Powell not only gives the history of the theory -- including things omitted from Walter Alvarez' book on the topic -- but examines the Officer-Page objections in a very open way, and discusses Dewey McLean's views. While Officer and Page have retreated and jumped on the bandwagon for global warming, McLean has been trying on his website to come to terms with the impact extinction model. This is a book that every student should read. While there are still those -- even in the sciences -- who could have bumper stickers and t-shirts emblazoned with "My Professor Said It, I Believe It, and That Settles It", there's no intellectual benefit to such an attitude. See also "Rain of Iron and Ice" by John S. Lewis and "T Rex and the Crater of Doom" by Walter Alvarez, the latter being more geared toward children.
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