Planet Earth, by Cesare Emiliani

About This Book

"Planet Earth" covers a full range of science, in this order: subatomic physics, cosmology, astronomy, mineralogy, petrology, seismology, plate tectonics, atmospheric science, oceanography, and the history of life. Chemistry, geometry and the principles of science slip in along the way. Only knowledge of arithmetic is required, although the facts and numbers that are the meat of science are abundant throughout.

The author's mission was to enable the people of the future. He put everything he had into "Planet Earth" because, as the preface says, "Our planet is at risk. . . . This book is an attempt to present a global picture of modern science within the framework of the origin and evolution of the world in which we live. It provides the background necessary to understand why our planet is at risk. It also provides the background necessary for devising ways to stabilize the planet."

Emiliani's language is personal, often playful. The best way to convey his personality is to reproduce part of the review of "Planet Earth" he wrote himself, in Eos on 8 June 1993.

Authors, Review Yourselves!

We all know that the process of reviewing scientific papers, research proposals, or books is a royal pain for everybody. . . . I have proposed the adoption of the "Absolute Review System" (ARS). In this system, the principal investigator (P.I.) does the reviewing. As I discussed in a recent article in the Journal of Irreproducible Results (1992, vol. 37, p. 12), the advantages are colossal.

For a change, research proposals will be reviewed by a person really qualified to do the reviewing—the P.I. himself (or herself). Program directors will save a lot of time and aggravation because the P.I. is sure to respond promptly and enthusiastically to a request to review his or her own proposals; scientists across the country will be freed from the demoralizing task of having to review proposals they do not understand; and the P.I., being the most knowledgeable person about his or her work, can be expected to be totally objective. Because field testing has proved ARS to be enormously successful (Jour. Irr. Results, 1992, vol. 37, p. 12), I now propose to extend it to book reviewing. To demonstrate how vastly superior this method is, I present here my thoroughly knowledgeable and totally objective review of my own book, Planet Earth, recently published by Cambridge University Press:

What a fantastic book Planet Earth is! It covers everything that anybody would want to know about our planet, from elementary particles to modern humans, in 552 easy-to-follow pages. . . .

The breadth and depth of this book are stunning; the author is obviously a genius of transcendental proportions (he told me so himself several times). The book is informative and instructive, all right, but on a closer look I discovered a number of misprints. When I pointed them out to the author, he brightened up and said, "Ah yes! I am using that in class. I told the students I would give half a point to any students who found errors. The students enthusiastically read the book word for word, and their grades skyrocketed. In fact, I think I will add more misprints in the next printing." Now that is what I call creative thinking! . . .

The book contains some new theories on the rise and fall of mid-ocean ridges, the origins of geoclines, the birth of the Renaissance, the origin of flight, the function of viruses in evolution, the origins of the Moon (which, according to the author, is a piece of Mercury—why didn't I think of that?!). When I asked the author for some evidence, he assured me that good ideas need no evidence and referred me to Einstein's 1905 paper on relativity.

At 4.86 cents per page, this book is a good deal compared to [four leading texts]. Of course, the phone book is an even better deal.

Cesare Emiliani, University of Miami