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THE FIVE AGES OF THE UNIVERSE

Name: THE FIVE AGES OF THE UNIVERSE
Author: Fred Adams
ISBN: 0-684-85422-8

INSIDE THE PHYSICS OF ETERNITY

by Fred Adams & Greg Laughlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1999

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Eternity is a daunting concept, but modern cosmologists are not afraid to face it. Cosmology usually concentrates on the beginnings of the universe, but what might happen at the other end of time is just as intriguing—and by far the greater portion of the story. Adams and Laughlin, two leading astrophysicists (at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley, respectively) divide the life span of the universe into five acts, beginning with the Primordial Era, the time of the Big Bang and its immediate aftermath, when hydrogen and helium were first formed in an explosive birth. The Stelliferous Era is our present period, when stars fill the universe with visible light. The authors expect this to last another 100 trillion years. The universe doesn—t end with the fading of the visible stars, but enters a time dominated by lesser lights: brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, and other stellar remnants. This is the Degenerate Era, when the primary source of cosmic energy is proton decay, slow and feeble: a typical degenerate star might achieve the brightness of half a dozen ordinary light bulbs. An occasional stellar collision may light up the sky with a supernova. After all protons decay, the universe will enter its fourth act: the Black Hole Era. Black holes’ enormous gravity protects them from losing mass and energy by ordinary processes, but they slowly dissipate through Hawking radiation and will become extinct after ten-to-the-hundredth-power years. This leaves only the most tenuous forms of matter and energy to fill out the Dark Era: electrons, neutrinos, and low-energy photons that interact only sporadically. The authors fill in this broad outline in fascinating detail, considering such questions as the long-term prospects for life and the possibility of recollapse to a singularity (a “Big Crunch”) rather than a slow dying out of the fire. A thought-provoking treatment of the grandest of subjects, highly recommended to anyone interested in the world beyond tomorrow.

Pub Date: June 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-684-85422-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Free Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999

Categories:

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

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ANCIENT ENCOUNTERS

KENNEWICK MAN AND THE FIRST AMERICANS

by James C. Chatters ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2001

A fascinating chapter in earliest American history, and an example of how far-reaching the ramifications of federal law can...

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A gripping account of the discovery and subsequent controversy that surrounded Kennewick Man, a 9,500-year-old skeleton found in the Pacific Northwest.

Anthropologist and forensic consultant Chatters was minding the shop in 1996 when the Benton County coroner came calling with a skull discovered in the nearby Columbia River in Washington state. Although the formation of the jaw and brow suggested to Chatters that the skull was that of a Caucasian (perhaps an early settler in the region who died a century ago), there was a puzzle in the form of an arrowhead (a projectile of a type that’s been out of use for many thousands of years) lodged in the skeleton’s pelvis. Radiocarbon dating revealed the astounding age of the bones; Kennewick Man was one of the most complete skeletons ever discovered from such a remote period. However, his age put him square in the middle of a controversy. Was Kennewick Man, a Caucasoid skeleton not traceable to any existing tribe, subject to the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act? If so, he would have to be reburied immediately, with no further scientific examinations. As Chatters relates the case, it is a striking example of how bureaucracy can be manipulated—in this case, by the Army Corps of Engineers and the local tribes who seized and held the skeleton, exhausting deadline after deadline for performing its own studies. After four years of delay, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit found for the tribes, at which point Chatters and eight other scientists sued for the right to examine the skeleton (this “ancient American fossil that even the government’s own experts admit needs to be studied”) before its reburial. Chatters, with true scientific curiosity, then moves into headier subject matter, advancing theories of how Kennewick Man came to be in the Americas, what his society might have been like, and what the projectile in his pelvis might suggest about human conflict in a remote age often painted as idyllic.

A fascinating chapter in earliest American history, and an example of how far-reaching the ramifications of federal law can be.

Pub Date: June 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-684-85936-X

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

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THE DNA MYSTIQUE

THE GENE AS A CULTURAL ICON

by Dorothy Nelkin & M. Susan Lindee ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1995

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Policy, popular culture, and genetics meet in this intelligent critique of our society's search for easy answers. Genetic essentialism is on the rise, contend Nelkin (Sociology/New York Univ.; The Creation Controversy, 1982, etc.) and Lindee (Sociology of Science/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Suffering Made Real, not reviewed). They argue convincingly that while the science of genetics doesn't offer conclusive biological information, it is shaping us culturally and being used to justify conservative social policy: If everything from intelligence and sexual orientation to alcoholism and violence is inherited, then problems can be controlled, ``not through the uncertain route of social reform, but through biological manipulation.'' The authors' assessment of genetics' dangerous social potential may sound like Orwellian alarmism, but they draw on solidly familiar examples from American popular culture, including television, movies, books, and the media (they cite, for instance, a TV movie, Tainted Blood, that posits homicidal tendencies being passed from mother to child). The book is also impressively up-to-date on the political front, bringing health insurance, adoption surrogacy, welfare reform, and concern about the family into the picture. This broad range of examples reflects the gene's remarkable currency—a power gained, Nelkin and Lindee claim, by the malleability of its potential. Culturally, the gene is conceived as everything from the computer chip of personal identity to the ``secular equivalent of the Christian soul.'' These assumptions bear frightening resemblance to the beliefs of the American eugenics movement in the early 1900s, say the authors, who point to a reemergence of social intolerance and blame. An important, timely commentary on the manipulation of scientific inquiry in the interest of political ideology.