Nemesis, The Death Star, Dr Richard Muller
Title: NEMESIS: The Death Star, The Story of a Scientific Revolution
Author/s: Dr Richard Muller
Condition: VERY GOOD (Owner inset sticker on P1)
Edition/Year: 1989
Publisher: Guild
Pages: 193
Format: Hardback
Category: Nonfiction / Science / Astronomy / Theory
About the Book:
Introduction by Dr Luis Alvarez
In 1984 Dr Richard Muller, Professor of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley, galvanized the world with his theory that a killer star – Nemesis – is orbiting the sun, barraging the Earth every 26 million years with a cataclysmic shower of comets. Now Nemesis: The Death Star offers Dr Muller’s own account of the genesis discovery, and aftermath of this epochal scientific event.
Though at first greeted with disbelief and even derision, the Nemesis hypothesis has established itself as the only viable scientific theory to explain a bewildering variety of phenomena in fields ranging from geology to astronomy to paleontology, including the dramatic disappearance of the dinosaurs. In a lively narrative, Dr Muller tells the saga of his scientific adventure, from the breakthrough when he first propounded the hypothesis to his mentor, Nobel prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez, through the painstaking research and experimentation as he struggled to evolve a coherent theory around the initial insight, to the battle for scientific acceptance after the publication of his article, and the still reverberating impact of his discovery on the scientific community.
In the tradition of James Watson and Lewis Thomas, Nemesis: The Death Star is the story of a major scientific breakthrough, by the brilliant scientist responsible for the event. It is at once a fascinating autobiographical narrative and a gripping intellectual adventure about how science actually works – at the highest level and from the inside.
