Customer Reviews

Stardust: Supernovae and Life: The Cosmic Connection

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What is the nature of the relationship between the Universe and life? If this sort of a question piques your interest, then you should read John Gribbin's "Stardust."

The four chemical elements most important to life as we know it include: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. How did these elements - the prerequisites for complex, organic molecules - come into existence? The Big Bang produced mainly hydrogen and helium (in addition to a smattering of a few other light elements). But what about the heavy elements required for life? They are the products of stellar nucleosynthesis - a process that happens in the interiors of stars. The atoms lodged in your body now, the nitrogen that is part of your DNA double helix was once `cooked' inside stars and then scattered into cold clouds of interstellar dust. If that does not give you a sense of (cosmic!) wonder, then you have not paused to let the information sink in.

John Gribbin reviews the long, intellectual road that led to this startling discovery. Before one could say that we are made of stardust, scientists first had to answer many other questions, like what stars are made of. Besides being a good science book, "Stardust" is also a good book about the history of science, showing, for example, what a vital role the development of photography and spectroscopy played in 20th century astrophysics. One of the especially interesting historical lessons here concerns our understanding of what goes on in the Sun (and the other stars for that matter) to generate heat. Before arriving at the answer that stars generate energy by nuclear fusion, which converts hydrogen to helium, there were many failed hypotheses, such as the gravitational collapse hypothesis. This problem, of how the Sun generates the energy that it does, was for some time a point of contention between the geologists and evolutionary biologists on the one hand and the physicists on the other. The former camp required the Sun to have been in operation for a very long time, in order for evolution to have the sorts of immense temporal scales required for the emergence of complex life, while the physicists estimated that the Sun had to be much younger, in order for it not to have exhausted its energy reservoir. Remarkably, it was the application of quantum physics (the physics of extremely small particles) which eventually provided the science needed to explain how stars shine.
The book is filled with many other stories, showing how our scientific knowledge of the Universe progressed in starts and stops. The B2FH paper (named after the scientists involved: Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler and Hoyle), entitled `Synthesis of the Elements in Stars' was a watershed event in explaining the exact process by which the heavy elements are generated inside stars.

These heavy elements (from carbon to iron) are ultimately expelled in several different ways: (a) through the gradual stripping of Red Giant star's layers, or if the stars are massive, (b) through novae and supernovae explosions. Supernovae explosions also provide the energy needed to synthesize elements heavier than iron. The scattering of fine dusty particles (stardust) provides the site where chemical interactions can occur as well as the seeds for a complex interstellar chemistry. Spectroscopic studies have more recently revealed the existence of organic, polyatomic molecules as part of the interstellar chemistry -- our Galaxy is seeded with the ingredients for life.

The appendix offers a short review of theoretical physicist Lee Smolin's principle of cosmological natural selection (an alternative to versions of the Anthropic principle). Many of the ideas presented here (at the cutting edge of cosmology) are extremely abstract and speculative and present many difficulties in terms of being subjected to experimental testing. However, they make for highly fascinating reading.

One of the themes in John Gribbin's book concerns the co-dependency between science and technology and the intimate connections between the two. Improvements in one ultimately lead to improvements in the other, and so on, in a circle. Technology continues to make gains. Some of the latest developments in cosmology are mind-bogglingly strange and there are indications that more big findings will emerge in the not-so-distant future. We may be in for another radical paradigm shift relatively soon, that will once again change our view of the relationship between the Universe and us, and our place in it.

John Gribbin, a masterful popular science writer, has written an excellent book on how we literally are all stardust. Of course, the theme of his book bears more than a little resemblance to Carl Sagan's famous "we are all starstuff" phrase, and it would have been nice if Gribbin had acknowledged that. But still, this is a more than worthwhile book.

Gribbin gives a detailed explanation of how, after the big bang, a mixture of hydrogen and helium coalesced into the first stars. Due to the high temperature of the stars, a process known as nucleosynthesis occurred, creating the elements crucial to life, including nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon, among others. When stars reached the end of their lives, there are novae and supernovae explosions, which carry the new chemical elements into the reaches of space, eventually creating new stars and planets. All of the amino acids necessary for life in the DNA "alphabet" are made up of what Gribbin calls CHON- Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen. So we really did come from stardust. I find that very profound and inspiring.

Of course, there's quite a bit more in the book than what I just outlined. Gribbin also discusses the history of how we know how stars can burn for so long, the structure of DNA, the development of the Big Bang Theory, and is very detailed about chemistry and the processes of star formation and nucleosynthesis. "Stardust" is an excellent book for any reasonably educated layman, and will assist in understanding how we are all connected to the universe and each other.

highly enlightening/illuminating ideas straight from the mind of the stars!

awesome.

Stardust is a magic bok about the cosmic connec tions between the atoms in our bodies and the stars themselves. I rate this John Gribbin's best ever book, and much clearer than Marcus Chown's Magic Furnace. If you only read one science book this year, it has to be this one!

This book has helped me to get a more comprehensive view of how all of this stuff around us came about. I always wanted to know more about the internal structure of stars and this does the job well.