The Life of Stars: The Controversial Inception and Emergence of the Theory of Stellar Structure

The Life of Stars: The Controversial Inception and Emergence of the Theory of Stellar Structure , Giora Shaviv Springer, New York, 2009. $129.00 (504 pp.). ISBN 978-3-642-02087-2

Progress in scientific research is often presented in undergraduate courses as straightforward, perhaps inevitable. In actuality, the path is considerably messier, strewn with the misconceptions and prejudices of individual researchers.

In The Life of Stars: The Controversial Inception and Emergence of the Theory of Stellar Structure, Giora Shaviv, an astrophysicist with a career spanning more than 40 years, traces the path that led us to our current understanding of stellar structure. Covering the critical period of the field’s development—the latter part of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th—Shaviv demonstrates how science eventually triumphs over scientists’ errors.

The story of stellar structure is interwoven with the development of quantum mechanics and the determination that nuclear fusion reactions produce the energy emitted by stars. The author provides excellent coverage of those two developments. He also effectively notes that stellar theorists often had access, in principle, to information that would have allowed them to take giant leaps toward a solution. But although the information was available, many researchers at the time were insufficiently acquainted with the emerging literature.

Early theorists still made progress, but the path to understanding had more in common with a random walk, slightly weighted toward progress, than with a direct march. On more than one occasion, personality clashes impeded progress; however, the author does not give the reader enough detail to assess the personalities of those involved. Nonetheless, he thoroughly explores the researchers’ views in light of what their peers were thinking and finding at the time.

In addition to the early controversies, the author discusses specific stellar-structure issues—including nuclear astrophysics and supernovae explosions—that he himself has researched. He also summarizes several more contemporary puzzles, such as the solar neutrino problem and what to make of helioseismology and SN1987A, the supernova observed in 1987. Their coverage may be adequate for astronomers who are not experts in those topics, but the principal researchers will probably feel short-changed. I thought the book should have discussed how the rise of computers in the 1950s and 1960s enabled both the solution of the appropriate equations—with realistic physics—and the ability to make credible comparisons with observations and modeled stellar evolutions. I also think that asteroseismology deserved a mention, although I appreciate the difficulty of summarizing in one book every unsolved problem in stellar astrophysics.

The author could have been better served by his editors. Sometimes a technical concept is introduced, but an explanation does not appear until several pages later. I also question the need to present as figures the front pages of old articles, as is done several times. The most remarkable mistake is figure 7.8, in which the entirely missing left half leaves an open space on the page. Also, the book contains a number of incomplete sentences and a few obvious scientific errors, such as a relationship, presented twice, that requires the astronomical unit to be about 20 000 solar radii; that value is high by a factor of 100.

Despite the occasional mistake, The Life of Stars, presented at a level that requires at least an undergraduate education in physics and an introduction to astronomy, delivers on showing budding professionals a realistic picture of how science gets done.