Customer Reviews

Seti Pioneers: Scientists Talk about Their Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

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

 

 

This book is a collection of interviews Swift conducted with sixteen scientists and engineers who played significant roles in starting a scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence (a seventeenth interview of a younger researcher is tacked on at the end). The interviews vary widely in substantive interest. Unfortunately, Swift gives us the full contents of each interview, including what he said himself. This forces the reader to wade through a lot of marginal verbiage to get to the nuggets of thought-provoking material. The book would be far more readable, and shorter, if Swift had been tougher about editing his own work. The concluding chapter provides some interesting sociological analysis.