Review

Vladimir Rubtsov: The Tunguska Mystery. 318 p. Springer 2009.
Review © Norman Sperling, February 22, 2013

The explosion of a large meteor above Chelyabinsk, on the same day as asteroid 2012 DA14 buzzed Earth, has brought back the riddle of the Tunguska event.

In 1908, far to the east of the Ural Mountains, over the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in central Siberia, something - an icy, rocky asteroid or comet? - slammed into Earth's atmosphere, exploded in the air, flattened a forest, and triggered unusually bright and colorful skies over much of the world for many days.

The site is terribly remote. Communication and transportation were primitive in the terminal times of the tsarist empire. After World War I, the new Soviet regime clamped down on communications with non-Communists.

Very little news about the Tunguska explosion leaked out through the Iron Curtain. A few Soviet scientists explored, but hardly any of their data reached the West. Eyewitness reports were gathered, but we didn't see them. Important scientists declared solutions, but we only heard their answers, not their supporting data.

The absence of scientific data opened infinite possibilities for speculation. Creative minds responded by suggesting a colorful variety of explanations. Some of those caught the public imagination.

Unbeknownst to the West, much the same was happening in the Soviet Union. By selecting favorite reports, theorists put together plausible narratives which hung together only as long as all other data were ignored.

This grated on a lot of Soviet scientists. After Stalin died in 1953, Khrushchev loosened the repression. Professional and amateur scientists responded creatively by founding the Independent Tunguska Exploration Group in 1958. These days the fashionable name for this centuries-old practice is "Citizen Science".

Investigators gathered information to plug holes in previous work. We hardly ever heard their results. In this book, an ITEG stalwart describes their research, findings, and speculations.

The story is FAR more complex than I had imagined. Exploration found a great deal more information than I had ever heard of, much of it scientifically strong. Practically all of it appears to contradict some theory or other. Several fairly strong solutions have been proposed, accounting for large portions of the observations. No solution, however, has yet accounted for all the credible data.

So this book is a superb example of exploratory science, and a superb example of a scientist who understands how much he doesn’t understand.

The most frequent suggestions are comets or meteoroids or asteroids. One huge problem is that our concepts of these have changed often, and radically, over the last 100 years, so the proposal means different things to different people at different times. Recent understandings relate comets to primitive chondrite meteoroids, which are extremely similar to asteroid types C, P, D, and K. Those meteoroids are probably chips of those asteroids. If they have surface ice, they appear as "comets". The Sun can vaporize surface ice while leaving ice inside.

Yet many details, from the exact pattern of the fallen trees, to eyewitnesses describing one object approaching from the south while a second one came from the east, to chemical traces (ytterbium!), don't seem to concur.

The suggestion that appears to satisfy the most data - still not all - posits 2 huge and powerful spacecraft, both turning to converge at the explosion site, and only one continuing westward from there. Science fiction fans like this scenario a lot better than most scientists do, but it satisfies more data than any other.

The comet concept satisfies the second-greatest quantity of data.

Now that this book has taught me a great deal more about Tunguska science, I am no longer confident about any one explanation. Rubtsov is right: we don't know enough. Previous such cases include:
• discovering the constancy of the speed of light, before Relativity;
• Auguste Comte's declaration that the composition of remote stars must remain forever unknown, before spectroscopy;
• noticing fundamental parallels in living things, like backbones, before Evolution.

Enjoy this book for its rich scientific and historical narrative, its scientific rigor, and its logical structure. The book is well written, well edited, and well produced. There's just enough Russian syntax to suggest local flavor. But if you want The Answer to what hit Tunguska, it's not here, nor anywhere else. Yet. Check back later.

© Norman Sperling, September 15, 2012

For all the guidebooks I've combed and all the historical technology I've plowed through, I should have known about the Collier Memorial State Park Logging Museum, but I didn't.

Tucked into a small state park on US-97 north of Klamath Falls in south-central Oregon, this is an absolute gem! They collect out-of-date equipment from the logging industry, and are re-arranging it into historical and thematic periods. Through their hardware, they can illustrate the progression from the muscle power of horses and oxen, to steam engines, to diesel engines. You can also see the progression from wood (which they used, as well as harvested), to iron, to steel. One of the excellent details in their signage was the slow fading in and out of the eras, rather than hard, sharp boundaries: each technology was kept as long as it was useful, and replaced when it wore out. A hundred diesels replaced a hundred steam engines over decades, not overnight.

Their knowledgeable volunteer guide showed me a great deal of detail, including how the 10-foot-high wheel haulers dragged logs, and how the steam donkeys could haul lumber, and themselves. The stronger the machines, the steeper the slopes on which they could work. An early horse-drawn road-grader sported a narrow blade, and the stronger the engines that pulled later ones, the bigger the blades could grow.

Most of the wooden equipment was handmade, of course. A lot of their gasoline and diesel equipment was made by Caterpillar and Case but they have several other makers too.

I've visited a lot of technology-through-time collections, but this one is decidedly different. Telescopes and microscopes operate in developed, protected environments, and look it. Cars interface with the great outdoors, but the outdoors are massively changed to accommodate them: we build smooth roads and service stations. Logging equipment is out in brutal nature, in the wild, coping with tough, heavy trees and boulders and canyons ... and they look it. No delicate fittings. No polish. No decoration. Enormous, strong wheels and treads. Fat, heavy cables and chains. Bulky, dented iron and steel housings. Heavily chipped paint. Repaired wheels. Patches and dings. Some equipment wasn't built strongly enough: all 3 tractors built by International/Mack have severely bent and dented hoods because that sheet-metal just couldn't stand up to logging in the wild.

The collection is obviously catch-as-catch-can. Logging companies donated 3 Caterpillar Thirty tractors, so they have 3, even though no story they tell requires that many. They have a big, complicated thresher because somebody donated it, not because farm equipment is part of their logging story. They should swap or sell such items to get more useful and relevant items or make improvements.

www.collierloggingmuseum.org
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collier_Memorial_State_Park

by Simon Quellen Field. Kinetic MicroScience 2011. $15. 978-0982210444

review by Norman Sperling, July 20, 2012

This fun murder mystery mixes private eyes, 2 police agencies who don’t get along with one another, a band, and a hospice. Las Vegas and Sacramento were both gambles.

Better than the physical settings are those in cyberspace. How to disappear. How to find people. How to earn money online. How to get attention. How to do more things, faster, better, and cheaper than mere casual websurfers know. It’s richly intertwined with the latest multimedia technology. That advancing technology will let the author update things as the forefront moves on – *using* the latest tech to *tell about* the latest tech.

Another advantage is that as soon as I finish this review, I’m going to tell the author about the 10 minor typos I found, and I bet he corrects them all before you can even buy your copy.

Weird Astronomy: Tales of Unusual, Bizarre, and Other Hard to Explain Observations, by David A. J. Seargent. 317p. Springer 2010. $39.95. 978-1-4419-6423-6.

reviewed and © by Norman Sperling, April 26, 2012

Australian astronomy writer David Seargent knows sky-watching - a long-time amateur astronomer, he discovered a comet in 1978. He has been telling about these curiosities in a long string of articles for Southern Astronomy, which became Sky & Space magazine. He has integrated and smoothed them out well for this book. But one standard that may have been OK in the magazine grates on me! He uses exclamation points way too much!

Between exclamation points, Seargent tells these neat stories with an easy flow and a light touch. He explains things in a clear, friendly way that teaches accurately but painlessly. Collectively, they form good lessons on scientific reasoning, the importance of data quality, and understanding how the sky works. The Universe seems to show more phenomena than humans have so far commanded. The stories are very enjoyable for readers who haven't heard them before. They will certainly entertain readers interested in any science.

Seargent also inserts suggestions for projects. Every reader, from novice through expert, can find some interesting possibilities to work on.

Some items from the main chapters:
* Our Weird Moon: William Herschel noticed 3 red glowing spots on the dark part of the Moon on April 19, 1787. He thought they were erupting volcanoes, but that would have left evidence that we would now see, and we don't. Seargent points out that that very same night had intense aurora as far south as Italy, and asks if the same flow of high-energy particles hitting Earth might trigger glows on the Moon.
* Odd but Interesting Events Near the Sun, including transits and comets.
* Planetary Weirdness dwells mostly on Mars, and wonders if microbes do, too.
* Weird Meteors: Curving, zigzagging, and black meteors have been reported.
* Strange Stars and Star-Like Objects: including assorted flashes and blinks.
* Moving Mysteries and Wandering Stars: several tiny comets have been spotted close to Earth.
* Facts, Fallacies, Unusual Observations, and Other Miscellaneous Gleanings: planets and stars by daylight, the thinnest crescent Moon, odd meteorites, and the "potassium flare" star whose spectrum actually measured a smoker striking a match.

The publisher's contributions to this book aren't as good as the author's. There are several typos, though none of them interferes with understanding. While the text is printed very clearly, many of the pictures are too dark and murky, and hard to distinguish. The color pictures lack resolution. The publisher appears to have trusted a new printing technology, which seems not ready for prime time yet.

Defining any book project requires many decisions to be made. They decided this one would be "popular" rather than scholarly, so they left out all references. But this subject matter is deliberately obscure, and they give no hint as to where to chase down any item that attracts your fancy. There were many items that I could not even guess where to pursue, beyond a web-search.

But many of them I do know where to look for: Mysterious Universe by the late William R. Corliss. (Sourcebook Project, 1979). When I started wondering about those Earth-approaching comets, I checked the Corliss compendium and found 2 of Seargent's 3, plus several others, all with full quotations from the original literature. Corliss has quite a number of Seargent's phenomena. More on the personalities and places can be found in Joe Ashbrook's Astronomical Scrapbook (Cambridge University Press), a compilation of his articles in Sky & Telescope magazine. So readers have a choice: the simplest pleasure-read is Seargent's. Ashbrook's is more scholarly. Corliss reprints the original sources verbatim, retaining all the original information and flavor ... sometimes stuffy. Also, Corliss never tells how a story came out: were the observations flawed? Did they start a new paradigm? Seargent can solve scholars' problems by posting his references on a website.

As expected, Seargent finds more articles in the British heritage, Ashbrook in the American. This leads me to wonder how badly culture and language still inhibit communication. What curiosities have observers logged in other languages? Can we get those correctly translated, compiled, indexed, and entertainingly narrated? What percentage of the total do these English-language sources contain? How can readers of lots of other languages become familiar with these?

Corliss compendia cover most sciences. Seargent has now published one on meteorology. Do other sciences have corresponding light-reading books of curiosities like Seargent's or Ashbrook's?