Customer Reviews

Thermonuclear Fusion in Stars (Physics Series)

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When I bought this book, I was excited, thinking I was going to get a book devoted to the book's title, "Thermonuclear Fusion in Stars". Books devoted to this subject are very few, and thermonuclear energy generation in stars is usually just one chapter in books on stellar evolution and structure. Such chapters often do not go into much detail.

After skimming through the book upon its arrival, I was quite disappointed. The book is a rather motley collection of chapters pertaining to a variety of topics in astronomy, ranging from discussions on the names of the constellations and mythology, to the author's discourses on his views of cosmology (likely not peer-reviewed, and not generally accepted in the scientific community). There is little on stellar thermonuclear fusion, despite the book's title. The more scientific chapters look to be mostly rehashes of material that exists in other books, and dating back to the classic texts of the 60s.

The book is apparently published by the author. The pages are generally poor quality photocopies from a not-too-well typed manuscript, and the figures and photographs are often too small and/or unreadable. I found numerous technical and editorial errors in the text. The bibliography is short, consisting primarily of references to the author's other publications.

For a "scientific" book, I did find the cover refreshing: it features a nice photo of the Andromeda Galaxy, a handsome young man playing the guitar in a scenic outdoors setting, and a pretty girl in a bikini!

Well, here's my bottom line: if you want a good book on stellar astrophysics, including thermonuclear fusion, go buy one of the excellent books available, such as those by Clayton ("Principles of Stellar Evolution and Nucleosynthesis"), Kippenhahn & Weigert ("Stellar Structure and Evolution"), or Hansen and Kawaler ("Stellar Interiors"). Indeed, there are quite a few other excellent books about stellar physics that are in print. These books will do a better job of educating you, and they're less expensive than the $80+ you'll pay for Green's book!

THERMONUCLEAR FUSION IN STARS by James A. Green has been updated to include STARCAL and CHANDRA software in C/C++ for computing fusion effects in stars. The WINDOWS source code for the STARCAL software has been appended to text, so that students may take advantage of pre-computed table-driven software for polytropic stellar models, bolometric corrections for atmospheric absorption of starlight, and tested algorithms from 10 different astrophysicists for computing p-p fusion and carbon cycle fusion effects. The software includes the effect of electrostatic screening on fusion processes, and the program may be easily applied to any star in the sky. A supernova progenitor report is prepared for stars over the 6.3 solar mass threshold for Type II supernovae, the derivation of which is presented in the text. The probability for a supernova progenitor to burst in this century is computed from formulae for stellar evolution derived in the text, as well as it's relative probability to explode within the progenitor class. STARCAL has been recently used to identify supernova progenitors in the night sky and compute their luminosity curves. In addition to stellar structure theory and thermonuclear process theory, the text presents a derivation of the abundances of the elements and a crunch-bang model for the Big Bang in addition to galaxy formation theory and star formation theory. The minimum masses of stars required to ignite specific nuclear reactions are derived, together with many other useful astrophysical formulae in this domain. The plates have been retouched somewhat in response to customer remarks.

On the nuclear astrophysics side, this book reviews the conventional theory, but makes advances in the presentation of nuclear forces, both in the strong and weak interaction domains. The properties of the strong interaction are derived directly from generalized vector-boson field equations, as are the electroweak field equations. The book shows how to obtain symmetry properties of weak decays from the field equations for the electroweak interaction that unify electromagnetism and the weak interaction. On the astrophysics side, it derives general formulae for the minimum stellar mass to ignite fusion reactions in stars that are perhaps the most rigorous closed-form solutions known. The latest state of the art of this volume derives the supernova minimum mass as 6.23 solar masses, just under the 6.5 solar mass for the progenitor of SN1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The low mass of this progenitor was a bit of mystery until this minimum mass was deduced. There are a number of other advances in stellar structure theory, including the details of the energy transport partition inside stars. Most impacting is probably Chapter 9 on stellar evolution, which includes cosmology. This volume derives Crunch-Bang cosmology from energy conservation rules and manages to derive the cycle time of the oscillating universe in a convincing way at about 218 billion years. Introducing a scheme for computing the maximum energy of a photon that can be generated by a known galactic process yeilds a limit of 120 GeV for observable photons. Since single photons of higher energy are occaisionally observed, we may conclude that we observe relics of other Big Bang events from time to time that originate in exterior oscillating universe systems of galaxies. Also, the book considers the crucial importance of observational time-delay in measurements of the Hubble constant, as supported by observational data from Micheal Rowan-Robinson's COSMOLOGY. The solution H(t) = (2/3)/t is derived as a special case approximating the present situation, where H is the Hubble constant in meters per second per meter, and t is the age is the age of the universe in seconds. However, an observational time-delay L/c must be included for a galaxy at L, so that H(t,L) = (2/3)/(t - L/c). Then when c = HL, we find L = (3/5)ct, so that we can only see (3/5) of the way back to the Big Bang with any space telescope we may construct. That is, the era of galaxy formation will be forever outside of the realm of observation. The book also includes the author's theory of galaxy formation based on the first Big Bang fireball phase transition He++ -> He+, and the theory of star formation in early galaxies with the consequences for galactic evolution. Other review material, including a table of contents, may be found on-line