Joseph Silk

"Seeing Earth rise on the Moon" (p 74): it defies understanding how such fallacious words could be written by an author who knows perfectly well that Luna's rotation is tidally locked to Earth. (E.g. he doesn't misidentify the body's far side as its "dark side".) A critical reader might find many other infelicities of varying kind and severity. But overall, this book is a very strong and detailed plea for the coming era of human presence on Luna to include astrobiological and astrophysical show more research. It advocates super-large optical and infrared telescopes at the lunar south pole and an ultra-large low-frequency radiotelescope on the far side, enabling searches for signs of exolife and probes of the cosmic "dark ages". show less

To write competently on cosmology, it is not enough to be a good astronomer. Your knowledge of particle physics also has to be up to snuff. Since writing _On the Shores of the Unknown_, Silk still hasn't learned that electromagnetism is much *stronger* than the weak nuclear force. And to state that muons bind protons and electrons together into neutrons is just shockingly erroneous. The novice reader, while learning much that is valid from the book, would have no way of identifying and show more disregarding howlers like these. show less

Astronomer Silk's command of particle physics is shaky; he makes a hash of the hadron/baryon terminology and wrongly says that the weak interaction is stronger than electromagnetism. Still, this is another of the many good books on cosmology (in the golden age of which we are privileged to live). What a pity that 99+ percent of the populace will never read any of them.

Cosmology -- a comprehensive and authoritative treatment. By the way, the 2002May24 issue of Science had some mind-bending articles on spacetime. One point made was that "Is the universe infinite?" has recently been answered with a definite maybe!