Curtis PeeblesResenhas

A very good book to anyone that desires to acquire a good glimmer about the subject of Near Earth Objects and their threat to our civilization.
It covers all aspects from technical to politics and is a real tribute to many dedicated professionals and amateurs astronomers, geologist and other various scientists which are making history in asteroid and comets hunting. It also make me disappointed to know that the Southern hemisphere, were I live, is like a blind concerning the NEOs search effort.

Only one aspect prevent me too score 5 stars: In my opinion, the too long discussion on chapter 8 about he streetlights issue of San Diego.

A wonderful start book for anyone who intend to initiate in the NEOs study.

http://nhw.livejournal.com/894197.html

This is a good book, but infuriatingly a bit thin on scholarship. There isn't a single reference to any article published in an academic history of science journal. I found this truly bizarre. More than half the references are to articles in Sky and Telescope, which is all very well, but has the academic community working on history of science completely ignored this topic? And perhaps a few references to the primary scientific literature might have been helpful?

Having said that, Peebles' heart is clearly in the right place. There's a whole chapter about the politics of street-lighting in San Diego, California, which is of marginal relevance to the history of asteroids but of great interest to those of us interested in the science/politics interface. There's a chapter on the naming of asteroids, which ends with the emphatic statement that "Mr Spock is a mythological figure." There's lots of interesting circumstantial detail on the personalities and life experiences of those who participated in the search for asteroids.

The scientific point I was left wondering about was the hardness of the boundaries between asteroids, comets and dwarf planets. The book was published before the recent downgrading of Pluto, but it's pretty clear that Pluto is in the same continuum of objects as Neptune's moon Triton – they just happen to orbit different primaries – and that at the other end of the scale various asteroids are pretty comet-like and vice versa, including the case of Comet Wilson-Harrington, now reclassified as asteroid 4015 Wilson-Harrington.