Charles H. Langmuir

For some folks geology is a dull subject, seen one rock..... This book removes that mindset. The last 60 years witnessed a radical change and revolution in the subject. In fact a better term to describe the subject would be planetary science. "How to Build..." is the second edition of a 25 year old classic. If you want a good over view of the subject with a good bibliography this is the book for you. As I mentioned earlier, the topic has changed and now draws from subject areas that were in their infancy 50 years ago. When talking about planet morphology you also need to look at the other planets in the solar system. Ditto with any topic regarding the atmosphere, climate, etc. This is a good overview book for anyone interested in the topic, whether you are high school student or a rising freshman thinking about a degree program.… (mer)

How to Build a Habitable Planet: The Story of Earth from the Big Bang to Humankind
Charles H. Langmuir and Wally Broecker

This is only the second book I've read online; I still prefer paper and ink. But the LANL library had it for free in electronic format, so.

Really quite an enjoyable read. The book covers the formation of the earth starting with the Big Bang and primordial nucleosynthesis and extends through the rise of humans. In between, there is nucleosynthesis in stars, planetary formation, the Theia event (the giant impact that formed the moon), differentiation of core, crust, and atmosphere, early life, oxygenation, and evolution.

The authors are geochemists, so perhaps it's no surprise that the parts I enjoyed most were on planetisimal formation. The chapters on Big Band and nucleosynthesis were areas I was already familiar with, and while the authors do a good job of explaining the concepts, it's an area of my own expertise so I caught the occasional glaring error. (Radiation from a black body does not increase exponentially with temperature, for example.) Chapters on the Theia hypothesis and on differentiation were also excellent. I think I finally have the concept of radioactive dating from isochrons clear.

There are a few idiosyncrasies. The authors present the notion that mantle upwelling is mostly as hotspots rather than along mid-ocean ridges as if this was settled, when it apparently is rather speculative and not widely accepted. This is the one part of the book that unexpectedly rang false to me.

That's because I expected the chapters on human impact to ring false, and so was not surprised. The authors expect humankind to look much further ahead than is reasonable and do not mention nuclear power once, that I could find. On the other hand, they thereby unwittingly give us the solution to Fermi's Paradox.

The tone surprised me. If the authors are any kind of creationists, they hide it well; but the title hints at teleology, and the tone is downright teleological, in an Anthropic Principle kind of way. I could almost imagine a theistic scientist like myself writing this book in order to throw the evidence for the hand of Providence into the reader's face without actually mentioning Providence. However, I doubt the author are actually religious in any sense; most likely the teleology is a pure literary conceit from authors who assume that the reader knows better than to take the idea seriously.

Notwithstanding these flaws, this is a two-thumbs-up book.… (mer)