Books

Books : reviews

David H. Levy.
The Quest for Comets.
OUP. 1994

In July 1994 telescopes around the world were trained on the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 and its collision with Jupiter. The extraordinary spectacle continued for several days as fragments of the comet caused a series of giant explosions including fireballs over a thousand miles across.

A co-discoverer of the comet was David Levy, one of the world’s foremost amateur astronomers. In this book he describes the exhilaration of comet-hunting (so far he himself has discovered nineteen) and provides an absorbing account of comets through history and their importance.

In the dawn of our solar system, the Earth was bombarded with comets that may have carried the materials necessary for life to begin. David Levy presents compelling evidence for later comet collisions and argues that great impacts not only caused the extinction of the dinosaurs but also ushered in new species of life.

David H. Levy.
Shoemaker by Levy: the man who made an impact.
Princeton University Press. 2000

It was a lucky twist of fate when in the early 19805 David Levy, a writer and amateur astronomer, joined up with the famous scientist Eugene Shoemaker and his wife, Carolyn, to search for comets from an observation post on Palomar Mountain in Southern California. Their collaboration would lead to the 1993 discovery of the most remarkable comet ever recorded, Shoemaker-Levy 9, with its several nuclei, five tails, and two sheets of debris spread out in its orbit plane. A year later, Levy would be by the Shoemakers’ side again when their comet ended its four-billion-year-long journey through the solar system and collided with Jupiter in the most stunning astronomical display of the century. Not only did this collision revolutionize our understanding of the history of the solar system, but it also offered a spectacular confirmation of one scientist’s life work. As a close friend and colleague of Shoemaker (who died in 1997 at the age of 69), Levy offers a uniquely insightful account of his life and the way it has shaped our thinking about the universe.

Early in his training as a geologist, Shoemaker suspected that it wasn’t volcanic activity but rather collisions with comets and asteroids that created most of the craters on the moon and most other bodies in the solar system. Convincing the scientific community of the plausibility of “impact theory,” and revealing its power for penetrating mysteries such as the extinction of the dinosaurs and the timing of the Earth’s eventual demise, became Shoemaker’s mission. Through conversations with Shoemaker and his family, Levy reconstructs the journey that began with a young geologist’s serious desire to go to the moon in the late 1940s. Sent by the government to find a way to harvest plutonium, Shoemaker instead found evidence in desert craters for what became his impact theory. While he never became an astronaut, he did become the first geologist hired by NASA and subsequently set the research agenda for the first manned lunar landing.

After a series of victories and setbacks for Shoemaker, the collision of Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter provided the most convincing proof to date of the role of impacts in our solar system. Levy’s explanation of the scientific reasoning that guided Shoemaker in his career up to this dramatic point—as well as his personal portrait of a man who found white-water rafting to be an easy way to relax—sets these fascinating events in a human scale. This biography shows what Shoemaker’s legacy will be for our understanding of the story of the Earth well into the twenty-first century.

David H. Levy.
Clyde Tombaugh: discoverer of the planet Pluto.
Sky Publishing. 2006

In early 1930, after spending countless nights in a cold dome carefully photographing minuscule portions of the sky, Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto. Today, as astronomers detect large new worlds at the edge of our solar system and a spacecraft embarks on its long journey to explore Pluto itself, we’re finally beginning to sense the true significance of Tombaugh’s find.

Clyde Tombaugh is one of the best-known astronomers — amateur or professional — of the last century. Although famous for his discovery of Pluto, Tombaugh left his mark on many areas of astronomical discovery, from comets to variable stars to superclusters of galaxies. David Levy’s biography of this planet hunter includes aspects of Tombaugh’s life that may surprise readers who know him only for finding the ninth planet. Based on interviews with Tombaugh and his colleagues, friends, and family, this book also draws on the scientific record to offer a thorough account of the life of one of astronomy’s most important figures.