T. Rex and the Crater of Doom

It's interesting to see that this book is now being used as a text in high school and even junior high school science classes. I had a great laugh from the reaction of a young reader who wrote that it was "boring" and that "Innocent eight graders shouldn't have to read this stuff"!Ah, yes. Innocence. But 14-year-olds aside, this is a fascinating and delightful story of scientific discovery and triumph second to none. It can be compared to James D. Watson's The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, both in terms of the importance of the discovery and for bringing to the reader some of the excitement and adventure of the quest. It is not, however, as the title might imply, the reading equivalent of watching a Stephen Spielberg movie! And perhaps we can be thankful for that.T. Rex and the Crater of Doom is the story of one of the great scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. Prior to Alvarez's work, it was not known what had caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Volcanism, disease, climate change, etc., were put forward as possibilities. But in1970 Alvarez began to believe that a large meteor or a comet had struck the earth with enormous force causing the extinctions. But how to prove it? At first it wasn't even imagined how a meteor could bring about such a catastrophe; but gradually it was seen that the debris thrown into the atmosphere by the force of impact would encircle the earth and block out the rays of the sun for months or even years at a time, thereby killing off plants both on the land and in the sea, thereby collapsing the food chain and starving the dinosaurs and most other creatures.This was the breakthrough idea, and an exciting idea it was. Of course there was great resistance, as there always is in science when established opinions are threatened, and Alvarez and his team of scientists had to fight mightily against the orthodoxy of uniformitarianism which had held sway in geology and paleontology since the time of Charles Lyell. It wasn't until twelve years later in 1992 that Alvarez's theory finally found general acceptance in the scientific community.One of Alvarez's purposes in this book is to show a general readership how scientific discoveries are made and confirmed. His tone is generous and he goes out of his way (unlike Watson in The Double Helix) to give credit to everyone involved. He makes it clear that the work was a shared enterprise. One thing that stood out in my mind was the central contribution from Alverez's father, Luis, a physicist who unfortunately died before the theory could be confirmed.Alvarez does however allow himself an occasional sarcasm vis-a-vis the old order. Characterizing the "conventional geologic opinion" on the formation of craters like the Meteor Crater in Arizona as due to "mysterious explosions that occurred at random times and places for no evident reason," he appends this observation: "In retrospect this causeless mechanism...

The title of this book says everything you need to know about its literary style. It's a fun romp through one of the leading scientific controversies in modern geology and paleontology, told by one of the central figures. It is not a scientific treatise, but a book of scientific history, detailing the process by which geochemical "detectives" sorted through Nature's red herrings in the attempt to track down the object that murdered the dinosaurs. It's also a case study in the philosophical debate between catastrophe theories and gradualism in a science so marked by its long debate with certain groups of religious conservatives that it developed a reflexive antagonism to any suggestion that some events might not have taken place over "geologic" time scales. A world-altering meteor impact was not something the gradualists wanted to discover. Alvarez clearly believes that the discovery of a 65-million-year-old impact crater on Mexico's Gulf Coast has pretty much resolved the question of what killed the dinos, and he's written his book to an audience of like-minded folk. If you're on the fence, the book might convince you. If you're in the opposing camp, it won't-nor is that the book's purpose. Rather, Alvarez is out to tell a good story of the progress of science. If, along the way, he teaches a bit of geology and convinces a few readers that geochemistry and geophysics are "cool," so much the better. Give this book to a high school kid with an interest in science-but read it yourself, first.

Although there are many questions that still remain about the extinction of the dinosaurs, this book does a very good job in detailing the work involved with finding the impact crater that hit 65 million years ago. This is one of the few science books that go into detail about the dead ends of the scientific quest not just the positive finds.

T. Rex is two books masquerading as one. On the surface it is about Walter Alvarez' theory of meteor impact and how he believes that it is the cause of the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period that marked the end of dinosaurs. It is in this way that the book starts, and describes the theorized events in lucid detail. The remainder of the book is of another kind, and that is the hidden treasure here. This book is a story of personal inquiry and uncertainty, of conflict between father and son resolved through conjoint quest, of the gathering of knowlege by many people with unrelated agendas to formulate and reinforce this revolutionary theory. It is a story of how science really works, how ideas are formed, challenged, reformed, and grow to be accepted. Though not what the title promises, this second book is a delight for anyone with an interest in what living the life of science is really like. It makes this book better than a good science read, and much more personal. Highly recommended.

If you're over 30, you've lived through the period during which extinction of the dinosaurs by catastrophic means was debated and explained. At first Luis Alvarez and his son, Walter, were ridiculed for their explanation of what happened at the Cretaceous/Tertiary or K/T boundary. Walter's book explains the chronology of events in a very readable fashion -- much less academic than the style of Stephen Gould and others. Its a story that tells how father and son found a way to work together, despite very different professions. It also shows how different disciplines worked together, across borders and countries. What's surprising is how quickly evidence began to accumulate to support the Alvarez' theory. And its interesting to see where they might have been sidetracked or made critical mistakes, were it not for good scientific practice