Reviews for The search

The average rating for The search based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-02-04 00:00:00 HermanA Pauwels This is an anthology of 44 articles, most originally published in Scientific American magazine and a few specially commissioned for the book, on various topics of astronomy. I assumed that it would be mostly on cosmology, but actually the emphasis is more on the planets and other bodies of the solar system, including Earth and the evolution of life. The "chapters", ranging from three to eight articles each, are on the birth of the universe, galaxy formation, the Milky Way, the genesis of the solar system, the planetary tour, life on Earth . . . and elsewhere, the microverse, and speculations on beginnings and endings; but the articles do not always fit into the categories. The articles, being written by different authors from different perspectives about questions which are still open, are frequently contradictory. Unfortunately, the dates the articles were originally published aren't given so it's not possible to trace any development in the arguments. Presumably, with the exception of a few obviously historical articles by figures such as Einstein, Schrodinger and Crick, most of the articles are from the five or six years prior to the publication of the book in 2000. Another problem with it is that it was not supplied with an index, so it is difficult to compare the discussions in separate articles of the same questions. The book was better than I had hoped for; I stopped reading Scientific American (which I had read faithfully every month for about twenty years) when it was bought from Freeman Publishers by some Murdoch subsidiary and dumbed down, but perhaps it was not dumbed down as much as I remember or the process began after 2000 because these are almost all interesting articles without too much of the "gosh-wow" that infects most popular science writing.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-04-07 00:00:00 Kevin Flowers Too bad it didn't have an index to the articles