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    Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe
    Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe
    Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe
    Audiobook12 hours

    Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

    Written by Lisa Randall

    Narrated by Carrington MacDuffie

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In this brilliant exploration of our cosmic environment, the renowned particle physicist and New York Times bestselling author of Warped Passages and Knocking on Heaven’s Door uses her research into dark matter to illuminate the startling connections between the furthest reaches of space and life here on Earth.

    Sixty-six million years ago, an object the size of a city descended from space to crash into Earth, creating a devastating cataclysm that killed off the dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of the other species on the planet. What was its origin? In Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, Lisa Randall proposes it was a comet that was dislodged from its orbit as the Solar System passed through a disk of dark matter embedded in the Milky Way. In a sense, it might have been dark matter that killed the dinosaurs.

    Working through the background and consequences of this proposal, Randall shares with us the latest findings—established and speculative—regarding the nature and role of dark matter and the origin of the Universe, our galaxy, our Solar System, and life, along with the process by which scientists explore new concepts. In Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, Randall tells a breathtaking story that weaves together the cosmos’ history and our own, illuminating the deep relationships that are critical to our world and the astonishing beauty inherent in the most familiar things.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateOct 27, 2015
    ISBN9780062421265
    Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe
    Author

    Lisa Randall

    Lisa Randall studies theoretical particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University, where she is Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees. Professor Randall was included in Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" of 2007 and was among Esquire magazine's "75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century." Professor Randall's two books, Warped Passages (2005) and Knocking on Heaven's Door (2011) were New York Times bestsellers and 100 Notable Books. Her stand-alone e-book, Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space, was published in 2012.

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    Reviews for Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs

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    • 4/5
      The universe, the solar system, and planet Earth have changed a lot since I graduated. They have not changed, our understanding has changed. Lisa Randall takes you through the current understanding right up the edges of what we are not sure about. Dark matter is one of those. Dr. Randall weaves together a number of different disciplines: cosmology, particle physics, evolutionary biology, environmental science, and geology. The are linked together to tell the larger story of the universe, our galaxy, our solar system, and our home planet.Dr. Randall's theory is in the early stages. She has put forth the proposition that as our solar system travels through the galaxy it periodically encounters small gravitational effects that knock objects out of the Oort cloud. These objects get nudged from the far reaches into the middle of the solar system. They can cause havoc if they are big enough. Dr. Randall thinks that the extra gravitational effects of dark matter are the key to the push and tie to regular cycle of our solar system's orbit in the galaxy. Based on that cycle, Earth encountered a push about 66 million years ago. That push resulted in a really big object crashing into Earth and killing off the dinosaurs.
    • 4/5
      I put this book on the bedtime story shelf and my fourteen-year-old picked it up, which means that I read this whole thing out loud to my family. There were times when I thought that this book's structure wasn't very friendly to a read aloud format, as there was a LOT of repetition and circling back on theories which sometimes made me impatient to read so slowly. But really, it probably helped the kids, especially as we read it one chapter at a time, so it helped with the "where we left off..." reminders.Okay, so there is a really interesting premise at the heart of this book, and that is: is there a cyclical nature to mass extinctions in the fossil record supporting evidence for cyclical catastrophic meteor strikes? And if so, could that cycle be linked to a structural issue in our solar system — and if so, could that structural issue be related to dark matter? Clearly, there are a LOT of interconnected features to unpack here, which means that even if at the end, you are unpersuaded by the thesis that dark matter killed the dinosaurs (which is not actually a foregone conclusion of this book), you still have learned about the fossil record, mass extinctions, meteor strikes, the structure of the solar system, dark matter, and predictive modeling. In a way, that is more FUN — a depiction of the way that science searches for connections and patterns, and that you don't have to prove your hypothesis correct in order to learn an impressive amount about the universe.A very worthwhile adventure.
    • 3/5
      Sixty-six million years ago another day dawned over a Cretaceous earth. Life was carrying on as normal, but everything was about to change because heading towards the planet at an astounding speed was a ten-mile wide object. The impact of this object left a crater, traces of which can still be detected and managed to obliterate the dinosaurs and 75% of all the other species on the planet. The few that survived evolved into the huge variety that we have today and provided an opportunity for the mammal to thrive. It is now thought that this was not one of those, one in several million chance events, rather an effect of our solar system interacting with the wider universe and the gravitational influence of dark matter.

      Randell has some interesting theories about dark matter, the pervasiveness of it in the universe and how the gravitational influence of dark matter causes disturbances in our galaxy and solar system. It is a substance that we know is there, but at present, we have no idea where it is, what it is or how to detect it. Quite elusive stuff, especially given how much of it there is out there. Randell writes with clarity on a difficult subject, although it is occasionally incomprehensible; but that is as much because I am fairly rusty at physics, rather than her explanations. She is well qualified to talk about this being Professor of theoretical particle physics and cosmology at Harvard, but this is one book that might be beyond the general science reader, even though they should probably give it a go.
    • 4/5
      This book, subtitled “The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe” sets out to explicate “our current knowledge about the Universe, the Milky Way, the Solar System, as well as what makes for a habitable zone and life on Earth.”The author, an award-winning professor of science at Harvard, explains that there were five major mass extinctions in the past 540 million years, as well as about twenty lesser ones, in which approximately 20 percent of life-forms died out. Many people are familiar with the extinction of the dinosaurs, the Mesozoic species that dominated the planet for more than 100 million years. She reviews the observations of geologists and paleontologists confirming that a big object hit the Earth 66 million years ago and as a result at least 75 percent of life on the Earth died, including the dinosaurs. The description of how scientists solved the mystery of the dinosaur extinction is fascinating. It included detecting huge amounts of the rare metal iridium in the clay of the K-Pg geologic boundary marking the period of the dinosaur extinction. The K-Pg clay layer was meticulously studied in almost 40 locations around the globe. Other rare metals in that clay layer were also found, at levels a thousand times higher than seen elsewhere on earth. Scientists also identified shocked quartz, which indicates a high-pressure origin, and crystals called spinels that point to rapid solidification after high-temperature melting. The only known sources for the state of these materials are meteoroid impacts and nuclear explosions. Obviously, there were no nuclear explosions before 1945, leaving only one "culprit" to account for the measurements.Scientists, further investigating evidence left by the meteor impact crater at Chicxulub (pronounced CHICK-shuh-lube) in the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, concluded that the meteor had to have been an incredible 10-15 kilometers in diameter. An object the size and speed of that meteor “would have released an energy equivalent of up to 100 trillion tons of TNT, more than a billion times greater than that of the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”Even just a kilometer-wide meteoroid, the author points out, would do global damage, creating extreme winds, huge tsunamis, tidal waves, massive earthquakes, and trillions of tons of material ejected into the atmosphere and then rained down upon the Earth.The only survivors would have been living creatures that could hide - through hibernation or otherwise. The author suggests that a disk of dark matter might have been the trigger dislodging a comet from its orbit - probably in the Oort Cloud, and send it veering toward the Earth. A meteor from the comet then caused all this devastation upon impact.In order to establish her theory, she has to take a detour to explain the composition and history of the Universe to readers. Thus she educates us about ordinary matter and how it differs from dark matter, and how we know about the existence of dark matter and dark energy. She talks about the composition of our Solar System, and how it operates within the Milky Way. She does all of this clearly and lucidly, with plenty of popular culture references and metaphors so that any reader should have no problem understanding her.Although most of the book concerns impacts from meteoroids, the author ends with a cautionary note about a possible sixth extinction unrelated to celestial bodies:“Many scientists today think we are currently undergoing a sixth mass extinction - of manmade origin. . . . The mammal extinction rate of the last 500 years has been about 16 times higher than normal, and in the last century the rate has been elevated by a factor of 32. Amphibians in the last century have died off at a rate nearly 100 times higher than in the past, with 41 percent currently facing the threat of extinction, while bird extinctions in this same time frame have exceeded the average rate by a factor of about 20. . . . The changes in the environment that are occurring now . . . have a disturbing resemblance to those at the time of the P-Tr extinction. [The P-Tr extinction was an event about 250 million years ago that was the most devastating known extinction in terms of the percentage of species that disappeared from the planet. While the cause of the P-Tr extinction remains the subject of controversy, massive climate change and changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans are thought to have been determinative.]”She warns:“Incredibly, the rate of temperature and changes in pH (which measures acidity) seems to have been comparable at that time [the P-Tr extinction] to what they are today. Human influence is almost certainly largely to blame for the recent diversity loss. . . . We are very rapidly undoing the cosmic work of millions or even billions of years.”Evaluation: The relationship between the dinosaur extinction and the presence of dark matter unfolds like a murder mystery. It was fascinating to read about how scientists pieced together clues and evidence to solve a “cold case” - one that occurred some 66 million years in the past.
    • 3/5
      Admittedly, my first reaction to the title of this book was that it must be some kind of joke. It sounded, well, loony. But Lisa Randall is a brilliant, world-famous, very influential theoretical physicist and I am...none of the above, so my initial reaction was, at best, probably uninformed. Sadly, I got lost a few times when reading this, especially when the discussion turned to particle physics (see above about what Lisa Randall is and I am not), but I think I caught the main thread of her proposal. I'll try to summarize:
      In order for the universe to behave the way it does, something that isn't ordinary, visible matter (like stars and such) must be exerting a gravitational influence. It's uncertain if this something reacts with anything else (like electromagnetism), but if it does, it's not obvious. By consensus, this unknown something is called dark matter, but no one really knows what it is. Professor Randall discusses some of the possibilities, few of which I can honestly say I fully understand. Her conjecture, based on what little data that exists, is that the dark matter may not be all one type of unknown something. Different dark matter parts may interact with other parts in ways not entirely unlike how protons and electrons of normal matter interact. Dark matter of this nature could, theoretically, form a disk that is contiguous with the plane of galaxy and exert significant gravitational influences on normal matter (like the Sun and our own lovely planet).
      So where do dinosaurs come in?
      Well...
      Impact craters on Earth suggest that there may be some periodicity (30-35 million years) to when really big things fall out of the sky and rearrange the landscape. (This is not yet firmly established.)
      Such impacts probably are not asteroids that normally hang out between Mars and Jupiter but are, instead, large comets. (Also not certain.) These comets could originate in the Oort cloud (which probably does exist, although we have no firm observational evidence).
      As the Solar System travels around the disk of the galaxy, it not only goes round and round but also up and down. This takes it through the galactic plane and the hypothesized dark matter disk, possibly every 30-some million years (although this is uncertain). When it does pass through, though, the dark matter could nudge objects from their stable orbits in the Oort cloud and send them inward toward the sun and Earth. Some of those could actually hit us, and one such might be the prime suspect for whatever caused that big crater off the Yucatan peninsula and took out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
      So you see, it's not loony. It's actually quite informative, although it is highly speculative. There are a lot of unknowns here, but some may be known better soon and the theory will stand or fall based on the evidence. That's science.

    • 4/5
      As a very readable journey through the start and formation of the universe, an explanation of the planets, mass extinctions, etc. - excellent. Learnt a great deal. Weight to Lisa Randall's theory appears to have been added as just when I finished reading this I saw a news article about a galaxy made of dark matter being found......!
    • 5/5
      Lisa Randall attempts to connect the dots between diverse topics such as particle physics, astrophysics, biology and archaeology. I think she succeeds admirably, but then again, I try to keep up with major developments in these fields and the names she drops and the research cited are all pretty familiar to me. It is not, perhaps, the entry-level book Randall might have hoped this would be. In some cases, this book seemed to be a lot of thinking out loud...trying to make a case for interdependencies as well as cause-and-effect of micro, macro, and galactic systems. It's an overview of the current state of research in many disciplines, and is of particular interest if you are following and are familiar with a previous snapshot of the research. Much of it, as the title indicates, revolves around the presumptive abundance of "dark matter", matter that is not directly observed, but inferred and must be of a certain quantity for other physical models to make sense. Dark matter theory has long been an interest of mine, but my technical knowledge is rather permanently stuck at just the level this book is fortunately written.
    • 3/5
      Writing for a popular audience about really technical subjects is really hard. This book just didn't hold my interest - I felt like all of the information it was either really obvious or way over my head, and there really wasn't any middle ground, nor did it bring the information that was over my head down to my level.On top of that, the author uses the last third of the book to present a totally new and as-yet unproveable theory about how dark matter affects comets. Although she goes out of her way to explain what is speculation and what isn't, I don't think that a book for a popular audience is the place to explain totally new theories - it's just not the right audience, and the fact that this is happening in a book for a wide audience makes me wonder if the theory is just too outlandish for the scientific community.The book seemed to have a lot of potential, but just didn't do it for me.
    • 3/5
      Interesting premise, but I think this book could have used better editing and could have been shortened by about 50 pages. I don't think I've ever seen a hardback book where a sentence was just cut off halfway, and once you find things like that it's hard not to notice more minor punctuation and word choice issues. That said, the subject is not easy to convey without lots of setup and I learned a lot.
    • 4/5
      Ms. Randall takes a long time to reach her conclusion. While I found the journey interesting, much of the science along the route I had at least a passing knowledge of. I wonder if others who would pick up this book might be in the same place. A bit more "meat" about the particular analyses which support her conclusion would have helped, since I thought the book ended rather abruptly. Any book of this kind, presenting a scientific theory to the general populace, needs to strike a balance in the technical detail presented, and make some judgments about the knowledge and capability of its readers. I might have taken a different approach, but I enjoyed it an d will look forward to reading other of her books.
    • 4/5
      Heard on "Science Friday."Amazon: "In this brilliant exploration of our cosmic environment, the renowned particle physicist and New York Times bestselling author of Warped Passages and Knocking on Heaven’s Door uses her research into dark matter to illuminate the startling connections between the furthest reaches of space and life here on Earth.Sixty-six million years ago, an object the size of a city descended from space to crash into Earth, creating a devastating cataclysm that killed off the dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of the other species on the planet. What was its origin? In Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, Lisa Randall proposes it was a comet that was dislodged from its orbit as the Solar System passed through a disk of dark matter embedded in the Milky Way. In a sense, it might have been dark matter that killed the dinosaurs.Working through the background and consequences of this proposal, Randall shares with us the latest findings—established and speculative—regarding the nature and role of dark matter and the origin of the Universe, our galaxy, our Solar System, and life, along with the process by which scientists explore new concepts. In Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, Randall tells a breathtaking story that weaves together the cosmos’ history and our own, illuminating the deep relationships that are critical to our world and the astonishing beauty inherent in the most familiar things."