The Nemesis hypothesis | Hacker News Reader

The Nemesis hypothesis

muller.lbl.gov

76 pointsPanoramix19 comments

This is interesting, but the last sentence implies there's a part 2. No link.

http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/nemch2.htm is a 404.

Ah: http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/Nemesis%20Chapters/

A brief reminder: write for the web.

Indeed, there's no link. But I believe it's the first chapter of his book: http://www.amazon.com/Nemesis-Death-Star-Richard-Muller/dp/1... His website looks rather messy, but as a 65 years old astronomy professor I guess he has other stuff in his mind...

He should chuck a link into the amazon site, I really want to read that now.

That book still remains one of the best books I have ever read. Completely hooked all the way through.

Nicely paced, "fun" but also well reasoned.

The fact that a theory that has stood such serious intellectual assault over the years after being invented, essentially, in the spur of an argument has always impressed me.

http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/Nemesis%20Chapters/Nemesis2.htm

An interesting point from the wikipedia articles: One version of the theory, that the nemesis star is a brown dwarf, should be testable in the next year or so. The WISE mission is launching in just over 33 days, and its year long mission will detect any brown dwarf stars within 2-3 parsecs of us, which is within the suggested range for nemesis.

http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/

Wikipedia's shorter, less narrative text: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_%28star%29

Why would you want something shorter, that was a nice piece of writing.

Of course cruel to just leave us hanging there.

It's fine writing, but upon visiting the linked article, I had no idea what it was. No indication of author or intent, or even if it was fiction or non. I was half-expecting an Asimovian plot twist revealing that the Nemesis would next appear later that very day!

Ironic that Asimov wrote a book about Nemesis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(Isaac_Asimov_novel)

By the time I finished it I thought it was the first chapter from Asimov's Nemesis and was very disappointed. Except I didn't remember it to be so well written...

An interesting follow-up paper: http://muller.lbl.gov/papers/Lunar_impacts_Nemesis.pdf

It's an open directory. You can find more on the story http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/Nemesis%20Chapters/ (among other files)

Wow, very cool that hot headed discussion could turn into what is, apparently, a well regarded theory.

On the other hand, Alvarez's method was really unbecoming of a scientist. I mean, he really shouldn't be "holding arguments in his pocket" to make someone feel foolish and drop an argument. He should take any and all criticism of his theory and use it as an opportunity to strengthen or drop it. Of course, he's also human... but still, that seemed more like a trick politicians use than scientists.

Actually, it's a pretty useful thing to do. Had he "laid his cards on the table", there's a good chance his partner would have never thought about the star hypothesis. His goal was to get a fresh point of view, which you can't if you fully describe your position.

Asimov wrote a novel about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(Isaac_Asimov_novel)

Not to be confused with the "Nemesis" by Clarke which is about something different apparently.

Asimov's Nemesis doesn't really have anything to do with the topic of this article.

Another theory for the periodicity of the extinctions has to do with crossing the galactic plane: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/perturbing-the-o...

There's a great book called 'Mitigation of Hazardous Comets and Asteroids' which is worth a read if you can find it. Totally overpriced at $192 on Amazon, I somehow got it at a quarter of that price.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com