Chris Impey

Talking About Life - Conversations On Astrobiology

Timothy Ferris - Voyager disk
p51 Neil !deGrasse Tyson: If someone's going to discover a new law of physics, it's going to be because they're hanging out at the edges of what we've already explored, not because they did something on the tabletop. No one's going to take an inclined plane and some wooden blocaks and a metal ball and come up with a new law of physics.
- p55 economics ... glory ... war ... " we had better put a check in one of those boxes, because if we can't, we're not going.
p60 Steve Benner: boron and ribose
- note Martin/Lane "energy first" makes the precursors of ribose (we've tried 200 variants, only one really works)
- p64 "extremophiles": not really - DNA requires pH near 7, Rio Tinto pH 1 furiously pumps protons out of the cell

p41 "The outer moons tend to have eccentric orbits, arbitrary inclinations, and orbit in the opposite direction to the planet rotation - the signature of captured bodies. Phobos and Deimos, for example, are asteroids that were captured by Mars.
- NOT "for example". Phobos and Deimos both orbit prograde. Phobos inclination is 1.093° (with respect to Mars's equator), eccentricity is 0.0151. Deimos inclination is 0.93°, eccentricity is 0.00033.
- Wikipedia says "The origin of Mars' moons is unknown and the hypotheses are controversial. The main hypotheses are that they formed either by capture or by accretion" and cites: Burns, J. A., "Contradictory Clues as to the Origin of the Martian Moons," in Mars, H. H. Kieffer et al., eds., U. Arizona Press, Tucson, 1992
- For comparison, Earth's Moon has an inclination of 5.145° to the ecliptic, and an eccentricity of 0.0549. The Earth's axis precesses over a 25,000 year cycle.
p78 "The point: physicists or astrophysicists will often reduce a problem to its simplest form to make calculations more tractable even though the correspondence to reality may be greatly reduced."
- KL And then other physicists build computer models, adding complications until the data fits better. And better, and better.
p82 power law:

"... since gravity is a power law force". Nah, Citation Needed
p175 "The mildly active galaxy M87 in the Virgo Cluster is the nearest big black hole, with a mass 3 billion times that of the Sun. Compared to this, the black hole in the center of the Milky Way is just a baby."
- KL Sagittarius A* mass is 4.3e6 Msun
p344 superstrings ... "no way to test the theory" (hence "Not Even Wrong" by Peter Woit)