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The Nemesis Affair: A Story of the Death of Dinosaurs and the Ways of Science
"David Raup is, to put it baldly and justly, the world's most brilliant paleontologist."-Stephen Jay Gould Nemesis is the name given by scientists to a (theoretical) small companion star to our sun. Every 26 million years, Nemesis's orbit brings it close enough to the sun to bombard our solar system with billions of comets. While most of the comets will float harmlessly beyond the outer planets, some passing through the sun's Oort Cloud will be deflected by its gravitational force toward Earth. Such a "large-body impact," the Nemesis theory holds, was responsible for the mass extinction that led to the demise of the dinosaurs. The next impact, millions of years from now, might very well extinguish humanity. In this lively, fascinating, and often disturbing book, updated and revised with the latest scientific evidence on terrestrial impacts, David M. Raup re-explores the controversies of the Nemesis theory from the trenches of the scientific community, and investigates the issues-both scientific and philosophical-of mass extinction. "A fascinating insider's view of scientists at work-and at odds-on the issues of extinction, evolution, and the fate of dinosaurs."-John Noble Wilford
- GenresScienceNonfictionPhysics
240 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1986
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 27, 2019
An exciting example of how science works
In the June, 1980 edition of Science an article written by four UC Berkeley scientists, led by Walter Alvarez, was published. This article claimed an extraterrestrial cause for the extinction of the dinosaurs and other species 65 million years ago. Reaction from paleontologists and others was immediate and largely negative. They saw it as a splashy, media-darling type of catastrophic explanation anathema to most working scientists. Author David Raup and his colleague Jack Sepkoski were however among those paleontologists (Stephen Jay Gould was another) who liked the idea. Since there are a number of other mass extinctions in the fossil record, they wondered if these events might be connected and how. They began a statistical analysis of the record, and in February, 1984 published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrating a 26-million-year periodicity. This led to the question, why would these extinctions be regular and what caused them? The answer came from astrophysicists who postulated (among other theories) a "Death Star" companion to the sun, dubbed Nemesis. This star would periodically come close to the sun, disturbing the Oort Cloud of comets, sending some of them to rain down on Earth, thus killing substantial amounts of life on earth.
It's a great theory and I love it. Unfortunately no one has ever seen this Nemesis star, which is not due to return for another 13 million years or so. In fact no one has seen the Oort Cloud either, although I understand most astrophysicists believe it is there. And of course paleontologists do not like catastrophic explanations for mass extinctions. In fact they hate them for both theoretical and personal reasons.
Thus we have the ingredients for an engaging and very human story about how science works and how it doesn't work. In this extremely readable book Raup reveals how scientific ideas develop, how they are rejected and accepted, and how some theories can neither be confirmed nor rejected, and how the scientific community treats such ideas, and how the media is involved. The blurb on the book cover has a quote from James Trefil comparing it as a memoir to The Double Helix, James Watson's personal story of how he and Francis Crick got credit for discovering the structure of the DNA molecule. I agree that this book is as readable as that very involving story, but Raup's book is more on the order of readable journalism, while Watson's book was more like a novel.
What is intriguing in both books is the sheer humanity displayed in both a positive and a negative sense. Here we see a kind of knee jerk, turf-protecting rejection of new ideas by the established cadre of scientists, especially in paleontology. In one sense this is understandable. If you work all your life to help build a certain view of the way things are in your chosen field, and along comes an idea that completely overturns your life's work, you are not going to be happy. You will rail against it and try to show that it is false. We see this in all fields of science since all fields are staffed by humans. I notice in psychology, for example, that the old cognitive and psychoanalytical people find it very difficult to accept the findings of evolutionary psychology, some of which make Freud, for example, look very much mistaken. In this sense scientists are like the Victorians who fought against the ideas of Darwin that threatened to overturn their view of the world (and did!).
Part of what makes this book effective is the openness with which Raup tells the story. He is candid to the point of showing and admitting his own faults and prejudices. He shows how success in science is gauged, not by dollars or fame, or even necessarily by what's discovered, but by prestige among colleagues. He writes on page 211 that "one's success as a scientist can be measured more by the number of people he or she puts to work on new problems than by the correctness of specific research results."
This book is a reprint of the 1986 edition with a new introduction and a new final chapter entitled "Update 1999." The Nemesis Affair is not over with. Raup lets us know that the crater has been found for the K-T extinction of the dinosaurs, and that most scientists now accept the Alvarez scenario for Cretaceous extinctions. However neither a dark star nor a tenth planet has been found, and so the acceptance of the periodicity of mass extinctions is on hold.
To show how ideas in science can lead to totally unexpected advances elsewhere, note that the work done in understanding how the dinosaurs died after the impact of the K-T meteor led to a realization of the possibility of "nuclear winter," which in turn was a factor in ending the cold war. It is somewhat amazing to realize that the work of Alvarez and his colleagues may have helped to prevent a nuclear holocaust. Some people think that money spent on SETI or on space exploration is wasted. I think that knowledge gained is always valuable, and sometimes, spectacularly so.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
In the June, 1980 edition of Science an article written by four UC Berkeley scientists, led by Walter Alvarez, was published. This article claimed an extraterrestrial cause for the extinction of the dinosaurs and other species 65 million years ago. Reaction from paleontologists and others was immediate and largely negative. They saw it as a splashy, media-darling type of catastrophic explanation anathema to most working scientists. Author David Raup and his colleague Jack Sepkoski were however among those paleontologists (Stephen Jay Gould was another) who liked the idea. Since there are a number of other mass extinctions in the fossil record, they wondered if these events might be connected and how. They began a statistical analysis of the record, and in February, 1984 published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrating a 26-million-year periodicity. This led to the question, why would these extinctions be regular and what caused them? The answer came from astrophysicists who postulated (among other theories) a "Death Star" companion to the sun, dubbed Nemesis. This star would periodically come close to the sun, disturbing the Oort Cloud of comets, sending some of them to rain down on Earth, thus killing substantial amounts of life on earth.
It's a great theory and I love it. Unfortunately no one has ever seen this Nemesis star, which is not due to return for another 13 million years or so. In fact no one has seen the Oort Cloud either, although I understand most astrophysicists believe it is there. And of course paleontologists do not like catastrophic explanations for mass extinctions. In fact they hate them for both theoretical and personal reasons.
Thus we have the ingredients for an engaging and very human story about how science works and how it doesn't work. In this extremely readable book Raup reveals how scientific ideas develop, how they are rejected and accepted, and how some theories can neither be confirmed nor rejected, and how the scientific community treats such ideas, and how the media is involved. The blurb on the book cover has a quote from James Trefil comparing it as a memoir to The Double Helix, James Watson's personal story of how he and Francis Crick got credit for discovering the structure of the DNA molecule. I agree that this book is as readable as that very involving story, but Raup's book is more on the order of readable journalism, while Watson's book was more like a novel.
What is intriguing in both books is the sheer humanity displayed in both a positive and a negative sense. Here we see a kind of knee jerk, turf-protecting rejection of new ideas by the established cadre of scientists, especially in paleontology. In one sense this is understandable. If you work all your life to help build a certain view of the way things are in your chosen field, and along comes an idea that completely overturns your life's work, you are not going to be happy. You will rail against it and try to show that it is false. We see this in all fields of science since all fields are staffed by humans. I notice in psychology, for example, that the old cognitive and psychoanalytical people find it very difficult to accept the findings of evolutionary psychology, some of which make Freud, for example, look very much mistaken. In this sense scientists are like the Victorians who fought against the ideas of Darwin that threatened to overturn their view of the world (and did!).
Part of what makes this book effective is the openness with which Raup tells the story. He is candid to the point of showing and admitting his own faults and prejudices. He shows how success in science is gauged, not by dollars or fame, or even necessarily by what's discovered, but by prestige among colleagues. He writes on page 211 that "one's success as a scientist can be measured more by the number of people he or she puts to work on new problems than by the correctness of specific research results."
This book is a reprint of the 1986 edition with a new introduction and a new final chapter entitled "Update 1999." The Nemesis Affair is not over with. Raup lets us know that the crater has been found for the K-T extinction of the dinosaurs, and that most scientists now accept the Alvarez scenario for Cretaceous extinctions. However neither a dark star nor a tenth planet has been found, and so the acceptance of the periodicity of mass extinctions is on hold.
To show how ideas in science can lead to totally unexpected advances elsewhere, note that the work done in understanding how the dinosaurs died after the impact of the K-T meteor led to a realization of the possibility of "nuclear winter," which in turn was a factor in ending the cold war. It is somewhat amazing to realize that the work of Alvarez and his colleagues may have helped to prevent a nuclear holocaust. Some people think that money spent on SETI or on space exploration is wasted. I think that knowledge gained is always valuable, and sometimes, spectacularly so.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
January 1, 2016
An interesting overview of the science behind the theory that the dinosaurs went extinct because of a large asteroid/comet impact, and the ancillary theory that such impact are periodic.
Raup is a scientist who was working in the field at the time, and had papers published in journals. In particular, scientists such as Raup thought there was a periodicity to extinction events,and that this was perhaps evidence of some large object at the edge of the solar system that perturbed the Oort cloud. One possible such object is a brown dwarf star orbiting the solar system whose elliptical orbit brings it close enough to the Oort cloud, every 23m-30m years, to cause these perturbations. This star has been tentatively named Nemesis.
This book follows the arguments for and against firstly, the connection between a catastrophic impact and the extinction of the dinosaurs; secondly, attempts to periodize other extinction events; and thirdly, some of the possible causes of such periodicity.
Raup's initial work was done in 1984, and thirty years later the scientific arguments for and against periodicity and the possibility of a brown dwarf or large planet are still being thrashed out; see the Wikipedia page on Nemesis for an introduction to the continuing debate.
What I found most interesting about the book was its insight into the methodology of science; the vagaries of peer review, the punch and counter-punch of articles in journals, the gradual changes in consensus in a particular field as evidence and theories morph. If you are interested in "what science is" and how it works, I think this is an excellent read.
Raup is a scientist who was working in the field at the time, and had papers published in journals. In particular, scientists such as Raup thought there was a periodicity to extinction events,and that this was perhaps evidence of some large object at the edge of the solar system that perturbed the Oort cloud. One possible such object is a brown dwarf star orbiting the solar system whose elliptical orbit brings it close enough to the Oort cloud, every 23m-30m years, to cause these perturbations. This star has been tentatively named Nemesis.
This book follows the arguments for and against firstly, the connection between a catastrophic impact and the extinction of the dinosaurs; secondly, attempts to periodize other extinction events; and thirdly, some of the possible causes of such periodicity.
Raup's initial work was done in 1984, and thirty years later the scientific arguments for and against periodicity and the possibility of a brown dwarf or large planet are still being thrashed out; see the Wikipedia page on Nemesis for an introduction to the continuing debate.
What I found most interesting about the book was its insight into the methodology of science; the vagaries of peer review, the punch and counter-punch of articles in journals, the gradual changes in consensus in a particular field as evidence and theories morph. If you are interested in "what science is" and how it works, I think this is an excellent read.
April 21, 2016
Némesis is a hipothetical brown dwarf star companion of our sun with a eliptic orbit that in the perihelion is near to the Oort cloud so peerturbing this and causing a shower of Oort objects on the solar sistem ,some on Earth and by this causing periodic mass extictions,as the mass extictions have a periodicity of more or less 25 million years is suposed that it is the periodicity of the orbit of Némesis.
To day there are no evidence of the existence of Némesis and this hipótesis is relatively forgotten.
The book is aimed to explain this hipóthesis but over all to the explanation of the extinction of the dinosaurs by a comet impact,this is really true as Walter Alvared had proved studyng the iridium layer across the planet and the smoking gun evidence of the Chichulub cráter in Yucatán.
Has a final chapter on the contrversy of the inversión of the Earth magnetic field
To day there are no evidence of the existence of Némesis and this hipótesis is relatively forgotten.
The book is aimed to explain this hipóthesis but over all to the explanation of the extinction of the dinosaurs by a comet impact,this is really true as Walter Alvared had proved studyng the iridium layer across the planet and the smoking gun evidence of the Chichulub cráter in Yucatán.
Has a final chapter on the contrversy of the inversión of the Earth magnetic field
June 15, 2016
This book is highly interesting especially to someone who has worked in the scientific field as it highlights the struggles new theories have to go through before they are even deemed fit for publication. The subtitle of the book should be read carefully: at least half of the book is about the "Ways of Science" and not so much about the Nemesis theory itself.
November 20, 2012
A fascinating study of the arguments about the demise of the dinosaurs and the development of the asteroid theory.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews