Chemische Evolution und der Ursprung des Lebens

Book Description

Über den Ursprung des Lebens und den Prozess der Lebensentstehung gibt es immer noch keine allgemein akzeptierte Theorie, dagegen aber eine große Reihe von Hypothesen, die z.T. untereinander im Widerspruch stehen. Inzwischen liegen jedoch wichtige Teilerkenntnisse vor, die man vor wenigen Jahren noch für unvorstellbar hielt. Horst Rauchfuss vergleicht die verschiedenen Theorien auf der Basis neuester Ergebnisse und gibt einen spannenden, gut verständlichen Einblick in den gegenwärtigen Stand der Forschung.

Book Description

Richard Alley, one of the world's leading climate researchers, tells the fascinating history of global climate changes as revealed by reading the annual rings of ice from cores drilled in Greenland. In the 1990s he and his colleagues made headlines with the discovery that the last ice age came to an abrupt end over a period of only three years. Here Alley offers the first popular account of the wildly fluctuating climate that characterized most of prehistory--long deep freezes alternating briefly with mild conditions--and explains that we humans have experienced an unusually temperate climate. But, he warns, our comfortable environment could come to an end in a matter of years.

The Two-Mile Time Machine begins with the story behind the extensive research in Greenland in the early 1990s, when scientists were beginning to discover ancient ice as an archive of critical information about the climate. Drilling down two miles into the ice, they found atmospheric chemicals and dust that enabled them to construct a record of such phenomena as wind patterns and precipitation over the past 110,000 years. The record suggests that "switches" as well as "dials" control the earth's climate, affecting, for example, hot ocean currents that today enable roses to grow in Europe farther north than polar bears grow in Canada. Throughout most of history, these currents switched on and off repeatedly (due partly to collapsing ice sheets), throwing much of the world from hot to icy and back again in as little as a few years.

Alley explains the discovery process in terms the general reader can understand, while laying out the issues that require further study: What are the mechanisms that turn these dials and flip these switches? Is the earth due for another drastic change, one that will reconfigure coastlines or send certain regions into severe drought? Will global warming combine with natural variations in Earth's orbit to flip the North Atlantic switch again? Predicting the long-term climate is one of the greatest challenges facing scientists in the twenty-first century, and Alley tells us what we need to know in order to understand and perhaps overcome climate changes in the future.

Customer Reviews:

The Two-Mile Time Machine.......2007-10-09

This is the book that every ill informed environmental and agenda driven policy wonk should read regarding climate. It is very readable; explains the science of weather and climate (They are two different things), and presents very thought provoking and serious issues. The point of millions of research dollars and tens of thousands of hours of research and study is that what we are experiencing today is not the norm. Humans, for the last ten thousand years, have had the luxury of an unusally stable and begnin climate with only minor weather disturbances as opposed to wildly changing climates of the past. The wild climate changes shift quickly rather than over thousands of years and very likely will do so again. Yes humans contribute some gases to the atmosphere (Carbon being the one most targeted), but water vaper is the biggest greenhouse gas with methane number three. Do we get rid of them too? The point is, that as the earth climate continues to warm (And it will do so without our help)there is only one climate response, and that is a quick return to deep cold (And cold lasts longer than warm), how do we prepare for wild climate swings? How many millions of people will be dislocated by continued warming and then sever cold? How much more energy will be needed to survive longer winters and cold that reaches further south than human history recalls? Where do we grow the food to feed the billions of us?

Excellent Book.......2007-01-10

Richard B. Alley can spin a good yarn. The book was very enlighting, I enjoyed the professional script. My hat's off to him & wish him luck in his future endeavors regarding the issues of past climates.

Time Traveler.......2006-09-12

Is global climate change a threat to humanity? Our best evidence comes from an uninterrupted 2-mile ice core taken from the Greenland ice pack. A pristine record of climate events over the last 110,000 years is displayed as delicate annual ice layers containing trapped atmospheric glasses, volcanic ash, pollen, lead levels, and isotope ratios. Dr. Alley's personal involvement in the project gives insight into the hardships and technical hurdles faced by scientists collecting this remarkable ice core. He does a good job of describing the intricate science that leads to a startling forecast -- our peaceful-appearing world is actually subject to wildly gyrating climate changes that can swing 40 degrees within a few years. During the last few millennia, have we have enjoyed a period of anomalous warm stability almost unprecedented in the 110,000 record of the ice core -- a happy condition that could suddenly end due to greenhouse warming from human industrialization. Within the space of a few years, high temperatures could melt the antarctic, flood our shorelines, and stall the gulf stream that brings warm tropical water to the British Isles. By the last half of the century, England might be buried under glaciers, and the distribution of our world's deserts and rain forests could be reshaped by chaotic, planet-wrecking storms. Science fiction? Not according to Dr. Alley -- whose ice cores show many similar events throughout history. The last half of Dr. Alley's book seems less interesting than the first -- perhaps because of his scientific hesitation at predicting what will really happen. The vast cost, the loss of biodiversity, and the potential threat to human lives -- or even our civilization -- is left mostly to the reader's imagination. Nevertheless one fact is clear -- we are riding a climate roller coaster that may soon start to take some sickening dips -- and the key to our survival may be locked within quiet, blue layers buried deep within the Greenland ice mass. -- Auralgo

Want to understand climate change?.......2006-04-12

In contrast to some other reviewers, I did NOT find this book a big yawn. I was fascinated by the exposition of how conclusions can be drawn about climate change. Alley briefly explains several different methods, but goes into detail on how ice cores can be used to make educated guesses about past climate. Very simply, every year there is a new layer on top of the Greenland glacier that can be analyzed chemically and differences in the chemical makeup of the layer reflect differences in the underlying climate (temperature).

I found the book fascinating, although it reads somewhat like a textbook rather than a story. However, my purpose in reading it was to try to understand for myself how conclusions on climate change are being reached, and the book fills that purpose admirably.

What happened?.......2005-05-21

Alley created an excellent Scientific American article ("Abrupt Climate Change", November 2004, available online) in terms of information and engaging writing style. His "Time Machine", though occasionally informative, reads like a slow elementary-school or sagacious politician's overview. "Many clever people are studying things in ice, and learning many things." Yawn. Maybe this was his intent, though nowhere are we forewarned. He's best when reporting his personal adventures in the ice core data recovery field he's part of. A crucial hinge in the unfolding "climate change" arena - what we used to call "global warning" until PR firms (minions of political parties and conglomerates, generously applying political correctness) changed the name to sound less ominous. This book is not about the most recent GRIP, Greenland Ice Core Project, cataloging 123,000 years of earth's atmospheric history in that region (and some 2 million year old plants to boot). It does reveal findings of a previous drilling - good for 110 millennia - and the Vostok ice core, extending back about 450,000 years. (Take that Creationists.)

These cores read like pages in a book, one year's ice layer piled atop another, trapping gases, dust and aerosols in each. According to Alley (repeated by Brian Fagan) the good news is, compared to previous interglacial warming periods, we humans have been remarkably lucky during the Holocene, the last 12,000 years (since the invention of agriculture), with relatively stable climate, except for a few major hiccups. The bad news is plural. Contrary to opinions, measurable, repeatable data shows we have among the highest concentrations of CO2 in these recorded histories; The thermohaline circulation (the ocean's equator-to-pole hot/cold exchange system) is a smoking gun in massive change (which according to NOAA data is shutting down via ice melt freshening); And the biggest news of all - ice cores show dramatic, even catastrophic climate shift, as Alley writes, "in less time than it takes it get a college degree". Oops. Apparently nature has a threshold. Once tripped, it's a long ride back - about a hundred thousand years. Such audacity nature has to act in a nonlinear fashion is inexcusable.

But nature and man are not without their ironies. While politicians, conglomerates and talk show hosts paint their rosy picture of longer summers on the beach (ignoring these beaches may be under water) or flourishing plant life in CO2-rich atmospheres (ignoring they may be fried in heat and dryness), as it turns out ice ages are triggered by warming. Standby. Exciting times coming, except nobody knows when. The Pentagon considers global warming a national security risk (at least enough to fund a study) - though to what generation? We'll keep rolling the dice, but at least Alley is trying to sound the alarm. Unfortunately, to the world's biggest offender, we heard all this in the Sixties, then tried to change the world by collecting litter on Earth Day - that's been a thousand fads ago. Nobody's listening.

Time Travel on Ice.(Review): An article from: American Scientist

Average customer rating:

Time Travel on Ice.(Review): An article from: American Scientist

Manufacturer: Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

General | Science | Subjects | Books

Science & Technology | Subjects | e-Docs | Formats | Books

The Two-mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future

Average customer rating:

The Two-mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future
Richard B. Alley
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000N656HI

Reason, Steven Postrel

. . . In print, at least, what might seem arrogant comes across as a kind of innocent, childlike enthusiasm, a lack of concern for anything but the sheer joy of figuring things out. His ruthless simplifications of geology, evolution, and neurology pay off because, as Bak notes, his models describe behavior that is common across these domains. This universality means that trampling across others' turf is not only acceptable, but almost mandatory, if the underlying principles are to be exposed. Finally, for the most part, Bak wants the reader to grasp the basic logic of his arguments; only rarely does he try to persuade with flights of poetic language or brute intellectual authority.

Book Description

This is a science book, intended for the general reader who is interested in science. The author is a physicist who is well-known for his development of the property called "self-organized Criticality", a property or phenomenon that lies at the heart of large dynamical systems. It can be used to analyse systems that are complicated, and which are part of the new science of complexity. It is a unifying concept that can be used to study phenomena in fields as diverse as economics, astronomy, the earth sciences, and physics. The author discusses his discovery of self-organized criticality; its relation to the world of classical physics; computer simulations and experiments which aid scientist's understanding of the property; and the relation of the subject to popular areas such as fractal geometry and power laws; cellular automata, and a wide range of practical applications. The book is readable without a science background--below the level of Scientific American.

Customer Reviews:

Intuitive & makes you think of universal laws.......2005-02-09

This book is a great attempt at finding some universality based on systems in a "critical" state, with departures from such state taking place in a manner that follows power laws. The sandpile is a great baby model for that.
Some people are critical of Bak's approach, some even suggesting that we may not get power laws in these "sandpile" effects, but something less scalable in the tails. The point is :so what? The man has vision.
I looked at the reviews of this book. Clearly a few narrow-minded scientists do not seem to like it (many did not like Per Bak's ego). But the book is remarkably intuitive and the presentation is so clear that he takes you by the hand. It is even entertaining. If you are looking to find flaws in his argument his pedagogy allows it (it is immediately obvious to us who dabble with simulations of these processes that you need an infinite sandpile to get a pure power law).
Another problem. I have been ordering the book on Amazon for ages. Copernicus books does not respond to emails. I got my copy at the NYU library. Bak passed away 2 years ago and nobody seems to be pushing for his interest and that of us his readers (for used books to sell for 99 implies some demand). This convinces me NEVER to publish with Springer.

a good book from a great scientist.......2005-01-24

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding how Nature works. Nature by far is bursty, intermittent, diverse, highly inhomogeneous both in time and space. This ubiquitous non-uniformity includes natural shapes, human behavior, dynamics of macroevolution, economics, distribution of galaxies, etc. In contrast, we all are very familiar with "bell curves", describing the statistics of the homogeneous-ordered-normal-boring. No theory can account properly with the prevalence in Nature of in-homogeneity and diversity. This book it is dedicated to propose a physical mechanism to generate all of that at once!. Starting with the 1987 Per Bak work on toy models, the book conveys the idea that there is hope in finding a few (instead of one for each phenomena) common ("universal") mechanisms from which the diversity (complexity?) seen in Nature emerges out of the interaction of the parts.
The theme of the book is: how to write the equation that generates complexity, and -importantly- without including complexity in the recipe. I usually recommend this book (long with Buchanan's "Ubiquity") to novice students eager to read the first things about this question, and the majority found my suggestion useful. The book contains a detailed bibliography helping the newcomer to check further the breadth and validity of the author' claims. The reader could disagree with some bold claims, but should be assured that there is not frivolous thinking wasting pages: all the material in the book was published in the most prestigious scientific journals and quoted by thousands of scientists who found inspiration in this perspective. That alone, set this book apart from recent ones claiming to have a theory for everything.

great book...dont be fooled!!!.......2004-03-30

great book. don't buy an old used copy here for $99 when they say it's "hard to find". you can buy a brand new copy direct from the publisher - www.copernicusbooks.com - for only $18!!!

Pretentious, but hollow inside.......2003-03-12

Per Bak claimed to have invented a fundamentally new way of looking at nature by ascribing an almost mystical significance to ``power-law'' distributions (for the non-technical reader, that simply means one quantity is proportional to another quantity raised to some power; the power, typically a number like 1.8, is a constant). There are two things wrong with this claim:

1. There is no deep significance to a power law distribution. All it means is that there is no natural scale of the phenomenon. (No power law runs from zero to infinity, so at best it means that there is no natural scale in the range in which the distribution is a power law.)

2. There is nothing new about this conclusion. It was understood in the 1940's by Kolmogorov in his theory of turbulence and Fermi in his theory of cosmic ray acceleration. The only thing Bak added was the application of these old ideas to the artificial and uninteresting problem of sandpiles.

There is nothing wrong with taking old ideas and applying them to new problems. However, Bak never admitted where the ideas came from. He never cited this earlier work. For example, models identical to his ``Self Organized Criticality'' were published by scientists working on earthquakes (Journal of Geophysical Research 90, 1894 [1985] and 91, 10412 [1986], building on earlier ideas by Knopoff). Although Bak was aware of this work, published before he ever began working on ``SOC'', he didn't acknowledge it. To a scientist this is an unpardonable sin, equivalent to a banker cooking the books.

There is a striking resemblence between Bak's How Nature Works and Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. Each author claimed to have made profound and original insights which explain not just one phenomenon, but almost every aspect of the world around us. In each case these supposed insights are essentially mathematical, based on models which ignore the actual physical, chemical or biological processes involved. And in each case closer examination shows that the work is almost trivial, and irrelevant to real scientific problems. You get out what you put in, and when you don't put any science in you, don't get any science out.

Each of these authors has also claimed credit to which he is not entitled by failing to acknowledge the prior work of others. They suffer from a would-be-genius syndrome, in which someone is so infatuated with his own supposed brilliance that he both exaggerates the slight significance of his work and fails to give credit to those who actually did it earlier....

Applied Self Organized Critically.......2001-12-17

Per Bak's book How Nature Works is about the theory of self organizing criticality and its applicability to a variety of questions and problems in several sciences. It is an interesting and quick read for the most part. I have read other books on self organized criticality that were far less understandable and more limited in their scope of applicability.

Although there were portions of Bak's work that were a little belabored-I found my interest in sand piles began to sag after the initial discussion, for instance-much of the rest of the book was enlightening. The discussion in Chapter 1 of the contrast between the clarity and simplicity of the laws of physics and the complexity and unpredictability of nature was particularly interesting as was the discussion of the difference between chaos and complexity. His explanation in Chapter 2 of the theory of self organized criticality and the history of its development is far clearer than I found Stuart Kauffman's to be. It might make a better starting place for anyone wishing to understand the theory a little better before going on to Kauffman's and other books on the subject.

Essentially the theme of the book involves the self organization of much of the universe, from stars and volcanoes to traffic jams and economics, into critical states sustained as stable systems until they evolve through cascade events or what Bak calls avalanches (after his sand pile paradigm) or catastrophes. Bak explains that the system maintains itself along a critical line, above which chaos rules and nothing can be predicted and below which nothing happens so there is nothing to predict!

Chapter 5 which deals with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions interested me in particular because of my own study of geology. Here Bak suggests that geophysicists' attempts at prediction of events is a lost cause. He believes it to be based upon the mistaken human habit of looking at random events for patterns and periodicity where none exists. While the history of a given event can be studied in some detail after the fact, the information derived is useless in predicting the future. In Bak's opinion, the variables involved are so legion and are interrelated in so convoluted a way as to be impossible to monitor before the fact.

In chapters 7, 8, and 9 the author attempts to model Darwin's gradual evolution, Gould's punctuated equilibrium, and the Santa Fe Institute's fitness landscape to see which fits the facts better. In general Darwin's theories are vindicated---no real surprise there---while punctuated equilibrium is also found to have it's place in a complete theory of evolution. Chapter 11 contained a section on the unavoidability of catastrophes and fluctuations---and by their extension, one supposes, biological evolution-which casts light on the boom and bust character of economics among other things. This chapter extends the use of the theory of SOC to human activities as well as to human evolution.

Average customer rating:

One of the best books I've ever read!

Tickle your funny bone

A collection of 10 short stories

fantastically hilarious

A terrific, salt-stained literary treasure

Doctor Dogbody's Leg (Heart of Oak Sea Classics Series)
James N. Hall
Manufacturer: Owl Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

19th Century | British | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

The Rover (Heart of Oak Sea Classics Series)

Decision At Trafalgar: The Story of the Greatest British Naval Battle of the Age of Nelson (Heart of Oak Sea Classics Series)

The Wing-And-Wing: Or Le Feu-Follet (Heart of Oak Sea Classics Series)

Percival Keene (Heart of Oak Sea Classics Series.)

Lord Cochrane, Seaman, Radical, Liberator: A Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald (Heart of Oak Sea Classics Series)

ASIN: 0805058311

Book Description

Ripping sea yarns from the creator of Mutiny on the Bounty.

James Norman Hall is best known as the co-author of the classic Bounty trilogy. In his later years, his favorite work was writing the tales spun by Dr. Dogbody, a peg-legged old salt who never lets the truth get in the way of a good story. Doctor Dogbody's tales vividly recreate the Napoleonic Wars, and delight with broad comedy, rollicking naval adventure, and characters that will live on in the reader's memory.

Customer Reviews:

One of the best books I've ever read!.......2006-09-20

Doctor Dogbody was a navy surgeon who spent most of his life at sea on sailing ships. As long as people can remember he has had a wooden leg. Whenever old mates gather around the fire with a pint in their hand and long to hear a tale, they anxiously await the tale of how the good doctor lost his leg. The tale is never the same twice!

This is one of those rare books that you keep on your bookshelf for re-reading. I have read "Doctor Dogbody's Leg" at least 20 times. I made the mistake of letting somebody borrow it and it
has disappeared. Guess I am just going to have to buy another copy!

Tickle your funny bone.......2000-07-01

A must read for any and all O'brien fans. This is one the funniest books I have ever read. The good doctor spins increasingly outragous yarns and somehow makes it all seem plausible. The writing is first rate and the characters are vivid and real.

A collection of 10 short stories.......2000-05-18

This book was a change of pace for the author, who was the co-author of Mutiny on the Bounty and other books. It is humorous light reading, with the tales set in the Cheerful Tortoise, as Dr. Dogbody, Royal Naval, meets with old acquaintances and tells tales about how he lost his leg. It sometimes rambles a bit, as tales might if told by an old-timer reminiscing. Overall, it is a good collection of stories that could probably be shared with children. So get a pint of ale, and sit down in front of the fire at the Cheerful Tortoise while Dr. Dogbody relates his adventures.

fantastically hilarious.......1999-02-26

A beautifully written and conceived collection (or is it one continuous tale?), this book will grab anyone who appreciates great humor and skillful writing. A true test of a book's greatness, this one I was truly sorry to see end. Grab a tankard of ale, or a glass of Port Royal, and settle down by the fire at the Cheerful Tortoise. You'll roar with laughter and gasp with astonishment at the good Doctor's tales.

A terrific, salt-stained literary treasure.......1999-01-30

This unique collection of short stories, all of which are based in a small and colorful Portsmouth tavern, is a fabulous read. Excellent characters, pure enjoyment layered upon tales of the sea, famous events and battles and a lot of witty and rich dialog. Dr. Dogbody's salty and humorous martime stories capture both the people and events of the time. Dogbody is a mixture of Harry Flashman, Forest Gump and Long John Silver. The supporting cast of characters is suberb, all carefully written to interface with Dogbody's amazing tales relating to the loss of his missing apendage. I'd love to see the BBC present ten episodes of this book. A clever and unique reading adventure. If you enjoy the Forester, Kent, Pope, Fraser or O'Brian's novels, you'll find this and keep it on you bookshelf and point it out to your literary companions with a chuckle.

Average customer rating:

DOCTOR DOGBODY'S LEG
James Norman Hall
Manufacturer: Redbook Magazine
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000K9RC34

Average customer rating:

Doctor Dogbody's Leg
James Norman Hall
Manufacturer: Little Brown & Co.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000ONIHXK

Average customer rating:

Doctor Dogbody's Leg (2-volume Limited)

Manufacturer: Redbook Magazine
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000HHQRCG

Product Description

These two volumes were published in a limited edition of 1500 by Redbook Magazine as an example of the fiction they publish. Each contain three stories of Hall's irascible ship captain. Each volume is hardbound with cloth spine. Volume 1 has marbled green boards, volume 2 marbled blue.

Average customer rating:

Doctor Dogbodys Leg
James Norman Hall
Manufacturer: REDBOOK MAGAZINE
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000Q57QC4

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books