Customer Reviews

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

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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.

The cover illustration grabbed me in my local bookstore. So I opened it, and started reading. By the time I put it down, I was late for dinner (and my wife was very unhappy). This account of gamma-ray bursts (weird explosions in the distant universe, discovered by a satellite meant to be sure the Soviets weren't cheating on the test ban treaty) reads like a detective novel, with false leads, colorful characters and feuds like the Hatfields and McCoys. After being misled by erroneous data and going down several blind alleys the astronomers think they have figured bursts out---a collapsing star spits out matter at nearly the speed of light, and it emits gamma-rays, visible light (enough to fry the Earth if one happens close by, but fortunately this is very unlikely) and radio waves. They still aren't sure if supernovas (exploding stars) make gamma-ray bursts or not. I didn't realize there was so much bickering in science (what about the pursuit of pure knowledge?), but it's an exciting story.

have been this book. Of course, he didn't, leaving all of us who loved Cosmos wishing he'd had time to tell us lots more. The Biggest Bangs is in Sagan's style, with history and personalities mixed in with a clear explanation of the science. In places it is hilarious (look for the bit about the alligators). Gamma-ray bursts were discovered by accident and took a long time to understand. They turn out to be very distant and incredibly powerful, but they are also very rare, completely unpredictable and don't last long, which makes them hard to study (how do you know where and when to point your telescope?). It took the astronomers a long time to figure all this out. They are human, get things wrong sometimes and disagree with each other a lot, just like the rest of us. The Biggest Bangs does a good job of showing this human side of science as well as the science itself. As Sagan said, science is our most powerful tool to understand the world. This is how it works.

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.

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.

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.

This would have been an excellent and very enjoyable book except for two major problems: the author's irrational bitterness against NASA and his resentfulness concerning the review process for scientific publications. The author does his usual whining about how it is all NASA's fault that more work in Gamma Ray Burst research is not being done. He provides a vast diatribe about how evil and conspiratorial NASA is. It leaves the reader with the impression that he cannot be objective about other subjects as well and that he may have had one of his own pet projects rejected so he couldn't buy the Porsche with first draw. Everything returns to normal for a while, and then he goes into another fit about the Scientific Peer Review Process, obviously revealing his own bitterness that one of his papers may not have been published. With these kind of emotional outbursts and losses of objectivity, it is no surprise that NASA and the Scientific Peer Process may lose some respect for the author. It ruined an otherwise enjoyable and interesting book for me and the editors should have removed these two sections before printing as they subtracted from rather than added to the book.

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.