Customer Reviews

The Big Splash: A Scientific Discovery That Revolutionizes the Way We View the Origin of Life, the Water We Drink, the Death of the Dinosaurs, the C

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The subtitle overstates the significance of this book (A Scientific Discovery That Revolutionizes the Way We View the Origin of Life, the Water We Drink, etc). The Big Splash is very technical and , for those of us without a Doctorate in Geophysics it is quite a dry read. The references to the Space Program and the human elements that show the competition and back-stabbing that goes on in the scientific community are more interesting and help to move you to the end of the story, but, this is little solice for the feeling of being let down at the conclusion (or lack thereof) at the end of the book. Unfortunately, this book is probably the best you can find on the topic, though. I guess you cannot expect every scientific story to be a great read. If you need the data and answers to questions you can find in this book (like I did), you probably won't find it anywhere else. Grab a cup of strong coffee.

Every so often you read a book that changes the way you look at everything because it shows that something we took for granted is wrong. This is one of those books. Frank is not a terrific writer. There are slow passages and sections that are overly detailed and filled with arcane information. However, he is a scientist that stumbled on the origin of water on Earth . . . small comets that are constantly hitting Earth's atmosphere. This is astounding and went against all of the accepted geologic theories of the origin of water on the planet.
This book is also about the tunnel vision of scientists and the vicious in-fighting that goes on in academia when the status quo is challenged. There is a truism that scientists don't change their minds; they just die off and are replaced by scientists who believe the new theories.
I read this book when it first came out and was mightily impressed. Just recently a newly lofted satellite has proven Frank correct and a Scientific American article detailed the proof and the fact that his nay-sayers are now either eating crow or are marginalized in their continued denial. Highly recommended, especially for those interested in Earth sciences.

Dr Frank develops a hypothesis that is very plausible, well supported and a suprisingly engrossing read. By the time I finished, my beliefs in the objectivity of the scientific community had been severly shaken.

He makes a rather complex subject easy to understand and enjoyable. If only I had been fortunate enough to have more teachers in college that could make a subject come alive.

The current widely-accepted view of science is that the Earth is only bombarded by about 300,000 tonnes of cosmic material per year. So when Dr Louis Frank and his colleagues made observations that they interpreted as a vast number of comet-like objects disintegrating as they hit the upper atmosphere they were startled. Conventional scientific wisdom told them these shouldn't exist.

After carefully examining all the evidence, they calculated that there were about ten million comet-like objects hitting the Earth's outer atmosphere each year, each one the size and weight of a small house. Since the mass of each of these comet-like objects was about 100 tonnes, the global mass accretion rate of comet-like material hitting the Earth amounted to 1,000,000,000 tonnes per year - vastly more than the current view of science.

Frank considered ignoring the evidence to avoid the controversy. Fortunately for us he didn't.

In his book, The Big Splash, Frank provides a very readable account of the astonishing investigations. At first they had thought the spots might be due to faulty instruments but after ruling out every possibility they could think of they had to face the fact that some sort of real event was causing the dark spots.

The likeliest candidate was vast amounts of water. Since the dark spots measured about thirty miles in diameter it amounted to about a hundred tons for each spot. The most likely explanation was relatively loose packed balls of water-snow comets breaking up as they hit the atmosphere, until they expanded into a thin ball of mist like gas some thirty miles across. The remnants of the small comet should continue down into the atmosphere until it slowed to subsonic speeds and finally mixed with the air in the upper atmosphere.

The big problem was the number of these objects. Every minute, twenty 100 tonne comets about the size of a house were slamming into the Earth's atmosphere.

If this rate was constant over the age of the Earth, the startling conclusion was enough water to fill the oceans.

Why had no one noticed this vast number of small comets? The answer given by Frank is that they are very difficult to observe and once they enter the atmosphere they mix with it and effectively disappear.

Man-made comet-like material was sent up by rocket into the upper atmosphere and produced the same dark spot on the ultraviolet images taken by the Dynamics Explorer satellite. This seemed to confirm the small comet explanation.

A dedicated search using a telescope found small dark objects in near-Earth space exactly where the ultra-violet images predicted. The rate of detection of these objects was the same rate as the atmospheric holes identified on the ultra-violet images from Dynamic Explorer satellite. It all fitted.

Frank describes how the number of small comets tended to strike a note of terror in other scientists.

Frank and his team believe future research will no doubt produce more surprises. This is only the beginning. I'm for one hoping he writes another readable account of those new investigations.

Frank explains in wonderful detail the problems that a scientist has when he makes an important discovery outside of his accepted expertise. He is not the first to suffer from this prejudice, nor will he be the last. But, it is important for us to be reminded that science too, often wears blinders and because of this, important discoveries are ignored and it takes decades before we are able to move forward in our knowledge of how things work.

Dr. Louis A. Frank has emphatically championed a very controversial theory. He believes that approximately 40,000 small comets are bombarding the Earth every day. In his theory, those comets are largely made up of water, and they are the origin of the majority of the water currently on the Earth. At the time this book was written, his theory was largely dismissed, but in the last five years, there has been some movement in his direction. Additional evidence has been discovered that indicates that something is going on, the unresolved question is whether it is due to the actions of water comets.
The problem with this book is that it occasionally reads like one of those nonsensical pseudoscience diatribes. It starts with the subtitle, which is the longest I have ever seen and continues into the dust jacket, where a paragraph is written entirely in uppercase. Inside, there are sentences that go beyond scientific arguments. For example, on page 123 there is the statement, "...there were objects out there that had never been detected before. It did not matter whether they were small comets, cometesimals, automobiles or sick cows." Well, yes it does, for his theory to be true those objects must be comets and one does not win scientific arguments by stating absurdities.
The descent into pseudoscientific jargon reaches a peak in chapter 24, "Where Are You Now, Galileo?" Every pseudoscientist quack uses the "they laughed at Galileo" argument. They try to convince people that their arguments are right by citing examples from history where the experts were wrong. However, this does nothing to strengthen their arguments and Frank is much too good a scientist to descend to this level. In fact, I will always remain convinced that this type of argument is an admission of how weak their positions are. Scientific theories will always live or die on the evidence and ad hominem attacks in defense of your scientific propositions only proves the weakness of your case.
There has been a slight movement in thought towards Frank's controversial theory in the past decade. However, while this book may convince some that he is right, the tone and form of the arguments do nothing to convince those who reach their conclusions based on the evidence. His cause would have been better served had he either not written it or maintained a scientific mindset when he did so.