Very High Energy Gamma-Ray Astronomy (Astronomy and Astrophysics Series)

Book Description

High energy gamma-ray photons are the prime probes of the relativistic or high-energy universe, populated by black holes, neutron stars, supernovae, quasars, and matter-antimatter annihilations. Through studying the gamma-ray sky, astrophysicists are able to better understand the formation and behavior of these exotic and energetic bodies. Very High Energy Gamma-Ray Astronomy summarizes the status of gamma-ray astronomy at energies between 30MeV and 50TeV at a critical point in the development of the discipline: the hiatus between the demise of the EGRET telescope and the launch of the next generation of space telescopes. Starting with an overview of the astrophysics of the bodies that generate high energy gamma rays, it proceeds to discuss the latest developments in observational techniques and equipment. By presenting the techniques, observations, and theories of this expanding frontier, Very High Energy Gamma-Ray Astronomy aids experimentalists and theoreticians in detecting and explaining gamma rays of the highest energies.

Gravitational Radiation, Luminous Black Holes and Gamma-Ray Burst Supernovae

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Unlocking one of the great unsolved mysteries in the Universe: how the first stars were made at the very dawn of time.

Gravitational Radiation, Luminous Black Holes and Gamma-Ray Burst Supernovae
Maurice H. P. M. van Putten
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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General Relativity: An Introduction for Physicists

ASIN: 0521849608

Book Description

Black holes and gravitational radiation are two of the most dramatic predictions of general relativity. The quest for rotating black holes - discovered by Roy P. Kerr as exact solutions to the Einstein equations - is one of the most exciting challenges currently facing physicists and astronomers. Gravitational Radiation, Luminous Black Holes and Gamma-Ray Burst Supernovae takes the reader through the theory of gravitational radiation and rotating black holes, and the phenomenology of GRB-supernovae. Topics covered include Kerr black holes and the frame-dragging of spacetime, luminous black holes, compact tori around black holes, and black-hole spin interactions. It concludes with a discussion of prospects for gravitational-wave detections of a long-duration burst in gravitational-waves as a method of choice for identifying Kerr black holes in the Universe. This book is ideal for a special topics graduate course on gravitational-wave astronomy and as an introduction to those interested in this contemporary development in physics.

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Unlocking one of the great unsolved mysteries in the Universe: how the first stars were made at the very dawn of time........2006-08-09

Out in deepest space lurks a force of almost unimaginable power. Explosions of extraordinary violence, are blasting through the Universe every day. If one ever struck our Solar System it would destroy our Sun and all the planets. For years no one could work out what was causing these awesome explosions. Now Maurice van Putten and other elite scientists think they have identified the culprit. It's the most extreme object ever found in the Universe; they have christened it a 'hypernova'. For decades scientists were baffled. Especially disturbing was evidence that these explosions might be coming from the furthest reaches of the Universe, billions of light years away. If this was so, then for us to see them on Earth they had to be on a scale that was beyond our comprehension. According to some, these explosions were so huge that they might even violate the most sacred law in all science: Einstein's famous equation relating mass and energy, E=mc². That law underpins nothing less than our understanding of how our Universe works.

It was not until 1997, when a satellite pinpointed the exact location of these bursts, that scientists began to solve the puzzle. It seems these huge explosions are caused by the death throws of stars twenty times the size of our Sun, which burn themselves out and explode, creating hypernovae. What then unfolded was a chain of events, which would ultimately point towards some of the most exotic wonders in the Universe: stellar nurseries (where new stars are born) and black holes. Observations show that--instead of fading away, as an explosion might be expected to--radiation continues to emerge from the area of a hypernova. This ongoing emission is characteristic of the process of star birth. Astronomers conclude that the hypernova grows rapidly along with other normal stars in a nursery, but burns out when its contemporaries are still in their infancy. Find a hypernova, and you have also tracked down a part of space where stellar synthesis is underway.

Supernovae and Gamma-Ray Bursters (Lecture Notes in Physics)

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Supernovae and Gamma-Ray Bursters (Lecture Notes in Physics)

Manufacturer: Springer
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Cosmic Catastrophes: Exploding Stars, Black Holes, and Mapping the Universe

ASIN: 3540440534

Book Description

Written by an international team of experts, this set of tutorial reviews provides a coherent and accessible summary of the current state of supernova research in all of its facets. The newly detected gamma-ray bursts are discussed in this context. While primarily addressing astrophysicists and astronomers, this book will also be of interest to cosmologists and nuclear physicists working on supernova-related issues.

Cosmic Catastrophes: Supernovae, Gamma-Ray Bursts, and Adventures in Hyperspace

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Excellent book
Cosmic catastrophies by J. Craig Wheeler
How stars work
The biggest explosions

Cosmic Catastrophes: Supernovae, Gamma-Ray Bursts, and Adventures in Hyperspace
J. Craig Wheeler
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0521651956

Book Description

In this tour de force of the ultimate and extreme in astrophysics, renowned astrophysicist and author J. Craig Wheeler takes us on a breathtaking journey to supernovae, black holes, gamma-ray bursts and adventures in hyperspace. This is no far-fetched science fiction tale, but an enthusiastic exploration of ideas at the cutting edge of current astrophysics. Wheeler follows the tortuous life of a star from birth to evolution and death, and goes on to consider the complete collapse of a star into a black hole, worm-hole time machines, the possible birth of baby bubble universes, and the prospect of a revolutionary view of space and time in a ten-dimensional string theory. Along the way he offers evidence that suggests the Universe is accelerating and describes recent developments in understanding gamma-ray bursts--perhaps the most catastrophic cosmic events of all. With the use of lucid analogies, simple language and crystal-clear cartoons, Cosmic Catastrophes makes accessible some of the most exciting and mind-bending objects and ideas in the Universe. J. Craig Wheeler is currently Samuel T. and Fern Yanagisawa Regents Professor of Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin and Vice President of the American Astronomical Society as of 1999.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent book.......2007-07-22

This book probably has some of the best descriptions for novae and supernovae, that I have seen, for non-scientists.

Cosmic catastrophies by J. Craig Wheeler.......2005-08-28

Highly recommended for the cosmically curious who does not have the mathmatical background. It is easy to understand and well written.

How stars work.......2001-02-26

I found this book a complete surprise. From the title, I expected only a story about explosions and collisions but this book is much, much more. It provides really brilliant descriptions of how all kinds of stars evolve and how they regulate their energy production. After reading this book I fully understood why aging stars produce more energy but are cooler than they were in their youth. A minor complaint might be that the content is not well organized. A type 1A supernova is explained here and a type 2 there and later some more about 1A etc. But, I shouldn't dwell on a quibble. This is a terrific book. After reading it I'll never think of iron or nickel in quite the same way again.

The biggest explosions.......2000-10-06

There seems to be an aspect of human nature that wants to search out and discover things that are the most extreme in their class. People just seem to love record setters. This is a book about cosmic record setters. Within its pages Wheeler describes the biggest, most energetic, oldest, densest, things in the universe. If cosmic record holders hold any interest for you, then I think you'll find this book as enjoyable as I did.

Wheeler begins his book by describing how stars form, how they evolve in response to gravity, how they ignite, how they burn, and eventually how they die. This is a logical introduction, since virtually all the examples of cosmic catastrophes involve stars in one form or another. Like people, though, the life of each star is unique - and the end times are very different. Wheeler does an excellent job of describing the negative feedback process that stabilizes solar activity. If the star generates too much heat it expands. This expansion reduces the temperature, and throttles back on the rate of nuclear fusion. If the star cools down it contracts, and the contraction heats it up again, keeping the rate of fusion at a remarkably constant level for long periods of time during the stars life.

Much of Wheeler's text is actually about how stars evolve. This is important because to understand their deaths, you need to understand how they are born and how they evolve over their lifetimes. Their deaths are frequently the most interesting parts of the story because they are often involved with the catastrophes that are the book's principal thesis. While I bought the book because of its discussion about cosmic catastrophes, I found it valuable for its descriptions of stellar evolution alone. This includes a nice description of the "solar-neutrino" problem as well as a nice explanation of the red-giant phase, and especially the last stages during the life of a massive star that explodes in a super nova.

The foundational understanding of the basics of stellar evolution makes it easier to follower Wheeler as he takes the reader on a tour of the major players in cosmic catastrophes: white dwarfs, super novae (of many different types), neutron stars, black holes, and gamma-ray bursts. Wheeler's descriptions of these phenomena (to the extent that modern science understands them) are among the best I've seen in a popular science textbook. There is also a smattering of discussion about the origin of the universe in the Big Bang, and some interesting speculation about time (and space) travel using black holes.

In any book dealing with modern cosmology and astronomy there are inevitable discussions about the nature of space and time and how they fit together with Einstein's theory of general relativity. Most such books have at least one figure showing a funnel-shaped construct with grid lines converging as they swoop into the tapering end where the black hole resides. Wheeler uses lots of such diagrams. However, I think he does a better job than most at helping the reader understand what the diagrams illustrate. More importantly, he helps the reader understand what the diagrams do not illustrate, and their limitations (he dispels some common misperceptions about these sorts of figures). I especially enjoyed Wheeler's explanations about how one might (with the application of the appropriate mental acrobatics) use the diagrams to actually envision what is really going on in our multi-dimensional world.

Another thing I liked about Wheeler's book is the clear and frequent illustrations. For the most part the author has anticipated those places where prose just cannot quite complete the mental picture. When this happens there is inevitably a well-constructed diagram that finishes the concept and makes things clear. There was one exception, however. Figure 7.3 really needs to have an arrow or circle marking the location of SN 1987A. [I'm pretty sure I found it, but the exposure changes between the photographs, and so I'm not quite sure. It would have been nice to have the author's help in preventing a false identification.]

Reading this book one gets the sense that even though it is a qualitative description of astronomy (there are no equations) Wheeler is not over simplifying. His discussion of super novae, for example, lists many classes and describes theoretical uncertainties that other authors gloss over or ignore all together. Of course there is much more detail to super novae than what is in Wheeler's book. But at the qualitative level Wheeler leaves the reader understanding that there are many classifications of super novae, that some of the boundaries between classifications are not always so clear cut, and that we still don't know a lot about how some types form, and how other types explode. These are concepts that other popular science textbooks don't always convey. I think the only thing missing from the chapters on super novae is a table that summarizes all the different types and some of their descriptive identifiers.

Unlike some popular science texts, Wheeler devotes quite a bit of time describing the evolution of binary stars, which play an important role in some of the greatest cosmic catastrophes. I think he does an especially good job of qualitatively describing accretion disks, and how they fit in the context of mass transfer in binary systems. It's this mass transfer that is ultimately involved in some of the most spectacular catastrophes in the sky.

Book Description

Gamma-ray astronomy began in the mid-1960s with balloon satellite, and, at very high photon energies, also with ground-based instruments. However, the most significant progress was made in the last decade of the 20th century, when the tree satellite missions SIGMA, Compton, and Beppo-Sax gave a completely new picture of our Universe and made gamma-ray astronomy an integral part of astronomical research. This book, written by well-known experts, gives the first comprehensive presentation of this field of research, addressing both graduate students and researchers. Gamma-ray astronomy helps us to understand the most energetic processes and the most violent events in the Universe. After describing cosmic gamma-ray production and absorption, the instrumentation used in gamma-ray astronomy is explained. The main part of the book deals with astronomical results, including the somewhat surprising result that the gamma-ray sky is continuously changing.

Flash!: The Hunt for the Biggest Explosions in the Universe

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A modern story of Scientific Discovery

Flash!: The Hunt for the Biggest Explosions in the Universe
Govert Schilling
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
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ASIN: 0521800536

Book Description

About three times a day our sky flashes with a powerful pulse of gamma ray bursts (GRB), invisible to human eyes but not to astronomers' instruments. The sources of this intense radiation are likely to be emitting, within the span of seconds or minutes, more energy than the sun will in its entire 10 billion years of life. Where these bursts originate, and how they come to have such incredible energies, is a mystery scientists have been trying to solve for three decades. The phenomenon has resisted study -- the flashes come from random directions in space and vanish without trace -- until very recently. In what could be called a cinematic conflation of Flash Gordon and The Hunt for Red October, Govert Schilling's Flash!: The Hunt for the Biggest Explosions in the Universe describes the exciting and ever-changing field of GRB research. Based on interviews with leading scientists, Flash! provides an insider's account of the scientific challenges involved in unravelling the enigmatic nature of GRBs. A science writer who has followed the drama from the very start, Schilling describes the ambition and jealousy, collegiality and competition, triumph and tragedy, that exists among those who have embarked on this recherche. Govert Schilling is a Dutch science writer and astronomy publicist. He is a contributing editor of Sky and Telescope magazine, and regularly writes for the news sections of Science and New Scientist. Schilling is the astronomy writer for de Volkskrant, one of the largest national daily newspapers in The Netherlands, and frequently talks about the Universe on Dutch radio broadcasts. He is the author of more than twenty popular astronomy books, and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles on astronomy.

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A modern story of Scientific Discovery.......2002-11-17

A few billion years after the Big Bang, a giant star ends its life in a spectacular explosion. In a fraction of a second, it releases more energy than an average star would in a 10 billion year lifetime, including tremendous gamma ray bursts traveling out at the speed of light. These gamma rays radiate out in all directions - some in the direction where the Milky Way galaxy will be born in a few hundred million years. By the time the first of these gamma ray photons have traveled half the distance to this new galaxy, our Sun is born with the Earth following some half a billion years later. Still these gamma rays are continuing on their journey. By the time they reach our Local Supercluster, dinosaurs are ruling the Earth. When they finally reach the outskirts of the Milky Way, the dinosaurs are long gone and the first human predecessors are walking on Earth. As these gamma ray photons approach the Pleiades, Galileo is looking through the first telescope. As they reach Alpha Centauri, a rocket is being launched from Cape Kennedy carrying a military satellite with a gamma ray detector on board. Four years later these gamma rays have completed their 10 billion year journey on July 2, 1967 and are detected by this satellite!
So begins the race to study these mysterious sources of intense gamma radiation and determine their origins. This is what "Flash" is all about. It documents the people who have devoted their lives since 1967 to understand the most powerful explosions in the universe, second only to the Big Bang itself, gamma ray burst. This is a very up-to-date and exciting book with a lot of the human side of scientific investigation described as well as a fair amount of good scientific information. I particularly liked chapter eleven, which has a beautifully written description of stellar evolution. This is a fascinating book on a relatively new phenomenon in this elegant universe in which we are such a small part. You are sure to want to learn more about these awesome sources of power after reading this book. You might want to get the video "Death Star" from PBS, which chronicles gamma ray burst in a way similar to this book.

Invisible Universe: The Electromagnetic Spectrum from Radio Waves to Gamma Rays : Grades 6-8 (Gems Guides)

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Invisible Universe: The Electromagnetic Spectrum from Radio Waves to Gamma Rays : Grades 6-8 (Gems Guides)
Alan Gould , and Stephen Pompea
Manufacturer: LHS GEMS
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Book Description

Developed in partnership with NASA, this unit introduces students to the electromagnetic spectrum and shows how astronomers can study the sky by detecting invisible light. After learning the types and properties of visible and invisible light, students tour our solar system and the universe investigating various celestial objects and the violent waves of radiation in space called gamma ray bursts.

Cosmic Mysteries (Voyage Through the Universe)

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Cosmic Mysteries (Voyage Through the Universe)
Time Life Books
Manufacturer: Time Life Education
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Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0809469081

The Biggest Bangs: The Mystery of Gamma-Ray Bursts, the Most Violent Explosions in the Universe

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An educational and insightful peek into the research on Gamma-Ray Bursts
Whiny
Gamma-ray bursts!
Written too Soon?
Science is Done by People

The Biggest Bangs: The Mystery of Gamma-Ray Bursts, the Most Violent Explosions in the Universe
Jonathan I. Katz
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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ASIN: 0195145704

Book Description

For over a quarter of a century, gamma-ray bursts were the outstanding mystery in astronomy. No one knew where they were or how they worked. The Biggest Bangs tells how the mystery was unraveled, from the discovery of gamma-ray bursts by a Cold War satellite system monitoring the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to the localization of bursts in distant galaxies and the observation of surprisingly bright flashes of light from the bursts themselves. The Biggest Bangs is for laymen with an interest in science, physicists and astronomers interested in subjects in those fields not their specialty, students in non-technical astonomy courses, and as supplemental reading for courses in the history of science.

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An educational and insightful peek into the research on Gamma-Ray Bursts .......2007-08-20

In this book, Dr. Katz (a professor of Physics) takes the reader on an educational and insightful trip into the history of research on the phenomena of Gamma-Ray Bursts ... bursts of highly energetic photons with energies far in excess of standard X-Rays - sometimes hundreds (even thousands) of times more powerful.

The journey of discovery goes all the way back to the early days of the Cold War, and fledgeling attempts to monitor international compliance to the nuclear test ban treaty ... and from there into the early days of the space program ... and on into the days of the Hubble Space Telescopes, the BATSE/GRO (Gamma Ray Observatory), HETE-2 (High-Energy Transient Explorer), and on into attempts to scatter GROs far and wide throughout the solar system, in order to use triangulation and parallax to pinpoint the location and distance of such bursts ... with the holy grail being to someday localize such a burst quickly enough to focus a telescope on the origin, and settle the ongoing (and heated) debates concerning the nature (and distance) of their origin.

The author does an excellent job of taking the reader along on a thrilling ride of discovery - not just of the phenomena at hand, but also on a lifecycle of the scientific method itself ... from the early stages of gamma burst detection, through early theoretical explanations, through increasingly complex experiments attempting better measurements, through setbacks of funding and accidents during and after launch, to revised theories and debates in response, to still more ambitious experiments by forward thinking and innovative minds ... and finally onward to the holy grail itself - timely photos of the afterglow of a super burst, and the long sought-after confirmation of the origin and nature of such bursts - a holy grail that, in this case, is found and described by the author in his closing chapter

The book is recommended, albeit with one minor stylistic nit ... the author has this inexplicable aversion to using superlatives when he writes about his subject. This causes him, at times, to project an overly-cool detachment, when describing mind-bogglingly powerful phenomena (on the order to 10**54 ergs) ... it left me feeling half-crazed at times, wishing I could shake him.

Anyway, if you like populist {astro}physicists-turned-authors like Brian Greene, you'll like Dr. Katz, and this book as well.

Whiny.......2006-08-28

I have to agree with a previous review, this book is so whiny of the lack of research in gamma-ray bursts that I forgot I was reading a science book.

Gamma-ray bursts!.......2004-12-03

Gamma-ray bursters were first detected in 1967, by satellites designed to verify complaince with rules against testing of nuclear weapons. This book traces the history of figuring out what produced the gamma-ray bursts and tells what we know about them.

The first question was: were they near us or far from us? That got answered more than ten years ago: they're far away. Besides the gamma-ray bursters, there were other objects, "soft gamma repeaters." We learn how all these phenomena started to become associated with faraway neutron stars. The soft gamma repeaters were interpreted either as a release of magnetic energy by the neutron star or as the sudden accretion of matter by the neutron star. And the gamma-ray bursters were interpreted as the, um, collision of binary neutron stars. Actually, I think there is good evidence for some gamma-ray bursters being collapsars rather than merging binary neutron stars, and I wish there had been a better discussion of all this. In addition, I would have liked to see more about the difference between the shorter and longer gamma-ray bursts.

In any case, we're led to a couple of obvious questions: just how big are these bursts? And how much damage would one do if it occurred in our galaxy? Well, they can dish out up to 10 to the 52 ergs per second. And they do that for about a minute. For reference, our Sun puts out about 4 times 10 to the 33 ergs per second. So for a minute, the gamma-ray burster is more than 10 to the 18 times as luminous as the Sun. Over a hundred thousand times as luminous as the entire Milky Way galaxy! That's scary. If a star 5 light years from us were to become a gamma-ray burster, the blast would hit us like an atom bomb going off less than 10 feet away. We'd be vaporized.

Still, gamma-ray bursters are rather infrequent. We might do better if the burster were, say, 500 light years away. Still, that would pretty much set half the planet on fire, not a very pleasant prospect.

Supernovae are about 10,000 times more frequent than gamma-ray bursters. But Katz explains that gamma-ray bursters may be more dangerous to us than supernovae. After all, we might well survive a supernova blast at a distance of 20 light years.

The good news the author gives us is that we might be able to predict when a gamma-ray burst would occur. He speculates that we might even know the time to the minute (assuming the merging binary neutron star theory is correct and we can make use of it), and know it years in advance. If that burst were a thousand light years away, what would we do? Most of us would get to the side of the Earth away from the blast, and that would protect us. And a few brave firemen would water down half the planet and hide out underground, and then try to put out all the fires! I've no idea what we'd do about all the induced radioactivity. Sounds like a marvellous science fiction story.

Anyway, I liked the book. I don't know why there isn't more popular interest in these fascinating gamma-ray bursts.

Written too Soon?.......2003-05-13

In the late 1960s the U.S. military discovered gamma-ray bursts: intense bursts of radiation coming from random points in the sky. Over the next thirty years these bursts remained one of the most mysterious astrophysical phenomena. Very little was known about them. This changed in 1997 when Paul Vreeswijk discovered an optical flash at the location of one gamma-ray burst. This discovery made it possible to determine that gamma-ray bursts are at cosmological distances and involve energies that are usually only seen in exploding stars. Jonathan Katz gives the history of gamma-ray bursts and provides a clear explaination of how astronomers have come to understand what they are and how they work. Unfortunately most of the book is devoted to what happened before 1997. Only four of the seventeen chapters cover the time after the discovery of the optical flashes. This is unfortunate because it has been since 1997 that science has been able to understand gamma-ray bursts. The book would have been much better if it had treated the two eras equally instead of concentrating on the early history of the field. The book also suffers from a slighly biased view of who contributed what to our understanding of gamma-ray bursts. The field is competetive, and rival researchers often refuse to give credit where credit is due. It is unfortunate that Katz chooses to continue this trend in a popular work. Gamma-ray bursts are a hot topic in astronomy, and the story of their discovery is worth telling. However, "The Biggest Bangs" is not that story.

Science is Done by People.......2002-10-02

The Biggest Bangs is really two books in one. The first book is an entertaining popular account of astronomical gamma-ray bursts. It tells how they were accidentally discovered (by satellites launched to monitor the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty), how (through the development of better instruments) we gradually learned more about them, how the right ideas were sifted from the wrong ideas (there were plenty of wrong ideas), and how astronomers finally arrived at their present understanding. The picture is still rather cloudy, so there are likely many surprises yet to come. This is straightforward popular science writing, uncontroversial and rather well done.

The second book hiding inside The Biggest Bangs is an account of the human side of science, warts and all. This is reminiscent of The Double Helix (although Katz is only one of many contributors to understanding gamma-ray bursts, and his own name doesn't even appear in his index, in contrast to The Double Helix, in which Watson was the biggest player as well as the author). In both books the human side is often ugly. Good ideas are rejected for funding, scientists can be real backstabbers (they're human beings with the usual share of jealousy and more than the usual share of ambition), and credit doesn't always go to the most deserving (the Soviet contributors seem to have received particularly short shrift). NASA comes in for severe criticism (well-deserved, according to most scientists who have dealt with that agency). NASA apparatchiks and people who believe that science is a never-never land populated by goody-goodies above mere human failings have not been pleased.

This second book within The Biggest Bangs is really a book about the history and sociology of science, using gamma-ray bursts as a source of illustrations. It occupies only a small fraction of the text, a paragraph or a page here and there. Yet it may the most interesting part, especially for readers who don't begin with a great interest in astronomy. If the people who run science read it and pay attention it might do some good. Science could be more efficient and productive, if it were run a little differently.

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Exploring the gamma-ray universe: Proceedings of the Fourth Integral Workshop, 4-8 September 2000, Alicante, Spain (SP)

Manufacturer: ESA Publications Division, ESTEC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: 9290926775

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