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Nemesis: The Death Star
The founder of the once-dismissed theory that a star orbits the sun and barrages the earth with meteors every twenty six million years, creating a wide range of phenomena, discusses the genesis, discovery, and substantiation of his work
193 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1988
2 people are currently reading
122 people want to read
About the author
Richard A. Muller
48 books154 followersRichard A. Muller is professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a past winner of the MacArthur Fellowship. His popular science book Physics for Future Presidents and academic textbook Physics and Technology for Future Presidents are based on his renowned course for non-science students. He lives in Berkeley, California.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 23, 2019
I fortunately found this out of print book after reading T. rex and the Crater of Doom by W. Alvarez. This book is a meticulous account on the author's role in the birth of the Nemesis star theory. Having been in the scientific field myself for a time after university, I found it a highly interesting read although I assume that it will be much less so for someone who has not spent time in academia.
April 9, 2019
Muller may well have been (sort of) right! Scientists today (2019) are seriously searching for one or more additional planets in solar orbit way out there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_...
Since it has been 40 years since I read this, I don't recall the details of Muller's argument. He is not mentioned in that Wikipedia article.
Muller's primary data rested on periodic extinctions every 26 million years presumably from a non-terrestrial source such as the disturbance of comets in the Oort cloud. His proposed villain was a distant dim dwarf star companion to the Sun. Most stars in the night sky are binaries.
Latest observations and calculations cast doubt on both that extinction cycle and the existence of a companion star.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis...
But the search for long-period planets goes on.
Since it has been 40 years since I read this, I don't recall the details of Muller's argument. He is not mentioned in that Wikipedia article.
Muller's primary data rested on periodic extinctions every 26 million years presumably from a non-terrestrial source such as the disturbance of comets in the Oort cloud. His proposed villain was a distant dim dwarf star companion to the Sun. Most stars in the night sky are binaries.
Latest observations and calculations cast doubt on both that extinction cycle and the existence of a companion star.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis...
But the search for long-period planets goes on.
December 29, 2025
I am unsure, how other people came across this book, but Professor Richard Muller is someone I had admired for long (I grew up reading his answers on Quora!), and had therefore wanted to read this book for a long time. Feels good to see someone explain the working of their brain, their thought process, the leaps they made in thinking, connecting things, it all just fascinates me and therefore, a this book was a good fit for me. Enjoyable read, but hey, as the book quotes Thomas Henry, "The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." Ball up top Professor Muller.
April 17, 2020
This book is genius. One of the best books I have ever read.
December 28, 2019
This is a fascinating book, but its scientific relevance is extraordinarily limited. Richard Muller's "Nemesis hypothesis" was an interesting idea, plausible yet controversial at the time it was proposed. The idea, to put it as simplistically as possible, is that there is apparent periodicity in mass extinction events on Earth which may be explained by the presence of "Nemesis," a hypothetical red or brown dwarf star beyond the Oort cloud, making our sun part of a binary system; gravitational disturbances by such a body could explain periodicity in extinction-level impact events.
The trouble is, when the hypothesis was first proposed, there was no real direct evidence for it, which the author freely concedes. Neither was there any evidence against it, but we only accept ideas into the body of scientific knowledge once they've been substantiated. This book is interesting because it presents a cutting-edge idea at the just-barely-plausible fringes of science and tells the story of how that idea was formulated.
Some decades later, there's little reason to think the Nemesis hypothesis is so plausible anymore. Though more recent research has actually independently confirmed the apparent periodicity in extinction events, the Nemesis explanation has become less plausible both because we know understand dwarf stars to be rarer than previously thought and, more damning, because numerous infrared surveys have failed to detect such a star. While absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, there comes a point at which we must admit that, if something really existed, we should have found it by now. We have never found Nemesis, and the scientific community--already skeptical of the idea in the 1980s--seems ready to relegate this hypothesis to the "interesting but wrong" file.
Where does that leave this book? It you want to understand what the science (as we now understand it) tells us about astronomy or about extinction events on Earth, this would absolutely not be the book to read. It's horribly outdated and advocates a largely-discredited hypothesis. If, however, you're interested in how scientific ideas are formulated and how scientists do their work, it might be exactly the book for you. It tells an interesting story and, as long as you make sure to double-check all of its contents against more recent data, you can actually learn a lot from it about the process of science, even though you won't learn much about the content of the body of scientific knowledge.
The trouble is, when the hypothesis was first proposed, there was no real direct evidence for it, which the author freely concedes. Neither was there any evidence against it, but we only accept ideas into the body of scientific knowledge once they've been substantiated. This book is interesting because it presents a cutting-edge idea at the just-barely-plausible fringes of science and tells the story of how that idea was formulated.
Some decades later, there's little reason to think the Nemesis hypothesis is so plausible anymore. Though more recent research has actually independently confirmed the apparent periodicity in extinction events, the Nemesis explanation has become less plausible both because we know understand dwarf stars to be rarer than previously thought and, more damning, because numerous infrared surveys have failed to detect such a star. While absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, there comes a point at which we must admit that, if something really existed, we should have found it by now. We have never found Nemesis, and the scientific community--already skeptical of the idea in the 1980s--seems ready to relegate this hypothesis to the "interesting but wrong" file.
Where does that leave this book? It you want to understand what the science (as we now understand it) tells us about astronomy or about extinction events on Earth, this would absolutely not be the book to read. It's horribly outdated and advocates a largely-discredited hypothesis. If, however, you're interested in how scientific ideas are formulated and how scientists do their work, it might be exactly the book for you. It tells an interesting story and, as long as you make sure to double-check all of its contents against more recent data, you can actually learn a lot from it about the process of science, even though you won't learn much about the content of the body of scientific knowledge.
April 8, 2012
Scientists don't like it when their cherished beliefs are cast aside like so much rubbish.
This is the story of scientists who found a thin layer of extraterrestrial material spread across the planet. Wherever they found it, the layer occurred at the same time as a mass extinction. As they dug deeper, they came up with the series that an object - which they named Nemesis - pays periodic visits to our planet, and then swoops deep into space on an extreme orbit of our sun. Whenever Nemesis returns, it drags with it clutter ranging from tiny pebbles to objects that are miles in diameter. One such object struck Central America millions of years ago, causing the worldwide climate changes which ended the domination of dinosaurs.
The scientists were nearly laughed out of the profession - the nerve of those guys! They refused to quit, and eventually assembled sufficient evidence to support their theory against the assaults of even the most fossilized of their foes. Well, most of them, anyway. Today, their revolutionary theory of the meteor strike which destroyed the dinosaurs is taught in high school science classes; however, most everybody has forgotten about Nemesis, since this deadly visitor has not yet been discovered in the night sky.
When it is discovered, will it be too late?
Muller writes about science in a clear and forthright manner, so even a knot-headed layman such as myself can understand, and even enjoy the story.
This is the best nonfiction book I've ever read.
This is the story of scientists who found a thin layer of extraterrestrial material spread across the planet. Wherever they found it, the layer occurred at the same time as a mass extinction. As they dug deeper, they came up with the series that an object - which they named Nemesis - pays periodic visits to our planet, and then swoops deep into space on an extreme orbit of our sun. Whenever Nemesis returns, it drags with it clutter ranging from tiny pebbles to objects that are miles in diameter. One such object struck Central America millions of years ago, causing the worldwide climate changes which ended the domination of dinosaurs.
The scientists were nearly laughed out of the profession - the nerve of those guys! They refused to quit, and eventually assembled sufficient evidence to support their theory against the assaults of even the most fossilized of their foes. Well, most of them, anyway. Today, their revolutionary theory of the meteor strike which destroyed the dinosaurs is taught in high school science classes; however, most everybody has forgotten about Nemesis, since this deadly visitor has not yet been discovered in the night sky.
When it is discovered, will it be too late?
Muller writes about science in a clear and forthright manner, so even a knot-headed layman such as myself can understand, and even enjoy the story.
This is the best nonfiction book I've ever read.
October 4, 2010
I loved this book. It's a great window into the real-world process of doing science, where fringe theories face a stiff challenge in gaining acceptance.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews