Book Review: "Stardust" by John Gribbin

Stardust (2000)
John Gribbin (1946)

198 pages
 
One of the popular justifications in campaigns promoting recycling is that material can be reused to create new products. In his book Stardust, astrophysicist and writer John Gribbin takes this concept to a whole other level, describing, as his subtitle states: The cosmic recycling of stars, planets and people. In an engaging mix of science and history we learn how the universe recycles the remains of stars to form the basic building blocks of solar systems and, finally, of life itself.

Gribbin introduces his topic by summarizing theories put forward on how life could have first appeared on Earth, before concluding that

[although] we still don’t know exactly how life began … we do know, very precisely, what mixture of chemicals is required for the existence of life as we know it. And we know exactly where those chemicals come from --- as a natural by-product of the processes of star formation and evolution. (17) 

Identifying Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen (CHON) as the fundamental elements to life, he focuses in particular on the properties of Carbon and Hydrogen, including their critical ability to easily form chemical links with other elements, and so to create such all-important structures of life as amino acids and DNA. This leads then to the central question of his book: “can we explain where the stuff we are made of, dominated by CHON, comes from?” (42)  The key word for Gribbin being explain, as both the title of the book and the introduction give away the answer: “stardust.”  Gribbin describes his motivation for writing the book as a desire to explain how scientists came to recognize the importance of stardust, to characterize its content, and to discover the processes of its creation.

Though Gribbin has targeted the book at a lay audience by avoiding the more complex details of the physics and chemistry involved, it helps for following his explanations to have some level of comfort with high school level science. To make the book more accessible, he does early on provide a brief but effective review of key scientific concepts, dusting them off for readers and so preparing a strong foundation for the rest of his text. He augments these explanations with clarifying sketches to illustrate the ideas introduced.

Gribbin’s presentation of the scientific history of stardust necessarily follows two scales of discovery that occurred roughly in parallel: the very large --- understanding the origins and development of the cosmos; and the very small --- understanding the constituent parts of matter and how they interact. He begins with the ancient Greeks and their understanding of what they saw in the night sky; in particular he highlights the philosopher Democritus, who proposed both that “the Milky Way might indeed be made up of countless numbers of stars … [and who] was also a leading early proponent of the atomic theory.” (44)   (For more on Democritus, see Carlo Rovelli’s excellent work investigating the intersection of science and history Reality is not What it Seems; my review here.)

Using Democritus as an example, Gribben highlights a key element of the scientific process, pointing out that “[Democritus] had no way to test his ideas because he lacked the appropriate technology. They remained hypotheses, not theories, until the technology to test them was invented.” (44)  This fundamental relationship between technological development and its relationship to theoretical understanding is central to Gribbin’s presentation in the rest of the book; he traces the intimate connection of the evolution and refinement of scientists understanding of the nature of the universe, including of stars and their systems of planets, to the availability of ever more advanced technology with which to make observations. And he doesn’t shy away from addressing the inevitable mistaken assumptions and dead-ends that scientists made along the way, and that often delayed progress until the technology became available to clarify and correct them.

As ever better tools came on-line, scientists were able to determine that the elements that had been discovered on Earth were also present throughout the universe, in stars and nebula. They also came to understand that our present universe had originated “from a superhot, superdense state --- the Big Bang --- about … 15 billion years ago,” (99) but that what “emerged [from the Big Bang]… was a mixture of 75 per cent hydrogen, just under 25 per cent helium, and a smattering … of very light elements.” (111)   The key question became then, how that “very light primordial stuff turned into the stuff we are made of?” (111)  The answer ultimately lay within an understanding of the processes involved in the creation, life, and, particularly, end-of-life of stars.

Gribbin describes how scientists came to understand that the earliest stars --- necessarily made from the only elements available, hydrogen and helium --- had short lives, at the end of which many expelled material into the cosmos as either red giants or, for some subset of stars, more dramatically as novae or supernovae. The processes that occurred as the dying stars ejected this material created a cosmic dust of heavier elements --- stardust. Supernovae in particular lead to vast amounts of these heavier elements, and Gribbin provides a fascinating review of the two types of supernovae that have been identified, and how they lead to the creation of different sets of elements.

The heavier elements contained in the nebulae of stardust created by that first generation of stars became a small but significant part of the next generation of stars that formed, which further enriched the interstellar material with an even larger proportion of heavier elements as these stars in turn completed their lifecycle. Each subsequent generation then continued this process of enriching the material available for the formation of new stars and their planetary systems.

As some scientists developed and demonstrated these theories for the end-of-life stellar processes that created heavier elements, others worked out an ever more refined understanding of how stars and planets form from this material. Gribbin describes what has been learned by using the formation of our own solar system as an example, and in particular the development of Earth and how it came to have the ingredients for life. Based on the latest evidence and understanding about the broad variety of molecular material contained in stardust (revealed and proven out using the latest technology), he summarizes current theories on how the fundamental building blocks of life may have arrived on Earth.

In an Appendix, Gribbin moves on from his main topic of stardust --- which he describes as now increasingly well-understood --- to the forefront of speculative science, at least as it stood when he was writing this book at the turn of the millennium. He notes that, while his book provides an explanation of the current understanding of how the universe we observe today arose from the Big Bang, it does “not necessarily [represent] the whole story of life and the universe.” (179)  At the cutting edge of astrophysics, the latest theories describe the potential origins for singularities such as that which caused the Big Bang; they postulate the existence of multiple universes, each with a potentially different set of physical characteristics, and one of which --- ours --- having the particular set of coincidences necessary for life as we know it. Thus, scientists continue to push forward, while remaining inseparably tied to what the latest technological developments make observable to them.

Stardust reads a lot like a detective or mystery story, though one in which the solution is revealed early on. The thrill comes from learning how successive generations of scientist-detectives, supported by ever more expertly engineered equipment, slowly but inexorably piece together answers to the mysteries of the universe. Gribbin’s engaging writing brilliantly achieves the right balance of conceptual overview, technical detail and scientific history to make his book comfortably accessible to those interested in understanding more about our cosmic origins.

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In an interesting note, Gribbin points out that it is incorrect to think of the Big Bang as having exploded to fill space:

The Big Bang was not an explosion that took place somewhere in empty space, with fragments from the explosion (galaxies) flying apart through space like shrapnel form an exploding shell. Rather, what happens is that space itself expands, and takes galaxies along for the ride. (100) 

I tripped across this wonderful video showing The Entire Life of the Universe.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Lamentation 2: the pointless dawn that will never have know you

In his book The Man of Feeling, Javier Marías evokes the heart-breaking loss of watching a lover die, and the acutely inescapable reality it brings with it of one's own mortality.

When you die, I will truly mourn you. I will approach your transfigured face to plant desperate kisses on your lips in one last effort, full of arrogance and faith, to return you to the world that has rendered you redundant. I will feel that my own life bears a wound and will consider my own history to have split in two by that final, definitive moment of yours. I will tenderly close your surprised, reluctant eyes and I will watch over your white, mutant body all through the night and into the pointless dawn that will never have known you. I will remove your pillow and the damp sheets. Incapable of conceiving of life without your daily presence and seeing you lying there, lifeless, I will want to rush headlong after you. I will visit your tomb and, alone in the cemetery, having climbed up the steep hill and having looked at you, lovingly, wearily, through the inscribed stone, I will talk to you. I will see my own death foretold in yours, I will look at my own photo and, recognizing myself in your stiff features, I will cease to believe in the reality of your extinction because it gives body and credibility to my own. For no one is capable of imagining their own death. (169)

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Other reviews / information:

My review of The Man of Feeling here.

Another entry in an occasional series of posts of lamentation. (The introduction to this series can be found here, and links to the complete series here.)

Book Review: "The Warmth of Other Suns" by Isabel Wilkerson

The Warmth of Other Suns (2010)
Isabel Wilkerson (1961)
622 pages

The renowned historian W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in the opening lines of his celebrated work The Souls of Black Folk (my review here) that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.”  From that prophetic observation, Du Bois proceeded over the course of fourteen powerful essays to describe the crippling social, political and economic situation faced by freed slaves in the South in the final decades of the 19th century, a period during which the short-lived promise of Reconstruction evaporated as Northerners’ interest shifted to the greater perceived economic benefit promised by reconciliation with the white South.


By the time Du Bois’ book appeared in 1903, politicians in the states of the former confederacy were aggressively codifying a separate and unequal situation for their black citizens in the form of Jim Crow laws. Thus, as the 20th century opened, extensive legal restrictions and deeply entrenched social proscriptions constrained most blacks in the South to a life as share croppers or day laborers. Factor in the ever-present risk of generally unprosecuted beatings and lynchings, and the situation for blacks in the south was little better than the slavery they had nominally escaped just a few decades before.

In one critical sense, however, things had changed dramatically for the former slaves: they now had freedom of movement. Though traveling for blacks remained unpleasant --- and far from risk-free --- the extreme dangers that had earlier led to the creation of the Underground Railroad were now largely a thing of the past. As a result, in the early years of the 20th century a small number of blacks began migrating North and West, looking to escape the desperate hopelessness and every-present risks that dominated their lives in the South.

Then, with the onset of World War I, industries in the North faced worker shortages and began aggressively pursuing cheap labor from the South, providing additional impetus to the tentative migration that had begun. The trickle of people leaving the South suddenly transformed into a growing flood that lasted well beyond the end of the war, as those who left became beacons of success and hope for relatives and friends who remained behind.

The environment in the South that helped motivate this migration and the experiences of those who joined the movement North and West form the basis of journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s engaging and thought-provoking work The Warmth of Other Suns, which recounts what her subtitle refers to as The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. She describes the main period of this migration as having lasted from 1915 to 1970, six decades that transformed the country, as

some six million black southerners abandoned the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every corner of America.  The Great Migration would become a turning point in history.  It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched.  It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system.  It grew out of unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s. (9)

Through Wilkerson’s captivating narrative the personal impacts and experiences of this migration come alive for readers. Eschewing a simple, dry recounting of the period’s social history, Wilkerson instead builds the story around the lives of three specific people who made the move out of the South, three individuals with concrete histories. Though she includes brief interludes that step back to fill in the broader historical details, those vignettes are generally at most a few pages long. The majority of her story consists of a series of sections that rotate between her three principals, starting from their early lives in the South, through their migration North or West, to their new homes in cities distant from their birthplaces.

The three people whose lives she chronicles each grew up in different parts of the South, allowing Wilkerson to highlight the variety of black experience and struggle across the region in the context of the broad range of Jim Crow laws and unofficial yet violently enforced social constrictions that existed. They also migrated in different decades, and to different cities in the North and West of the country, and so experienced differently the newfound freedoms outside the South, as well as the numerous challenges of trying to find jobs and housing, and raising families far from their southern roots.

We are introduced first to Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, who worked as a sharecropper picking cotton along with her husband and two children in Mississippi; she and her family migrated to Chicago in 1937, as the beatings and lynchings come too close to home and life too dangerous to continue on in the south. Next we meet George Swanson Starling, who grew up in the Citrus belt of Florida; forced by his father to abandon his dreams of college after his sophomore year, he worked as a day laborer in the citrus fields until his agitating for better pay for the workers forced him to escape to New York City in 1945. Finally there is Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, who grew up in central Louisiana witnessing the challenges faced by his father as a school principal, and his mother a teacher; Foster chafed at the lack of opportunity and rigid caste system in his hometown, and when an opportunity to go to Morehouse College in Atlanta presented itself, he trained as a doctor, and eventually settled in Los Angeles in 1953.

Wilkerson opens the book by briefly introducing her three main characters, as well as the broader history of the Great Migration they become a part of, before dividing the main narrative arc of her story into three major parts. The first section describes her characters’ experiences growing up in the Jim Crow South. The second focuses on the events that finally led each of them to make the life-upending decision to escape the crushing reality of their lives in the South and migrate far from their families and hometowns. The third then describes the world each of them encountered in their destination cities: the many freedoms they discovered, but also the challenges they faced as they settled into a world that, though it did not have the level of restriction and violence of the South, confronted them with unwritten, and shockingly rigid rules at every turn. The book closes by describing the final years of the three, as they reflect back on their experiences and also the impact their choice to migrate had on their children and grandchildren who grew up in the North and West.

By focusing the book on the lives of these three particular individuals, within the context of the broader history of black life in America in the 20th century, Wilkerson makes the story of the Great Migration more personal for readers. It becomes difficult to cling to the misunderstandings and incorrect assumptions that seem to have endured for so many about the post-slavery reality of the black experience. Faced with specific migrants whose backstory we come to know, and so about whom we come to care as individuals, the soul-sapping discrimination and terror they repeatedly encountered becomes impossible to dismiss and ignore.

And, in fact, many events that Wilkerson describes recall the line from Mark Twain: “Truth is stranger than fiction.” However horrific the period of slavery that came before this migration was, when learning about its details, one can fall back onto the concrete fact that the slaves were in a condition of complete subjugation, and so perhaps ‘not surprisingly’ at the mercy of brutal owners and masters. It seems to become all too short and easy a walk from that idea, however, to the perniciously false conclusion that that time and those conditions ended over a century and a half ago with the Emancipation Proclamation and the 14th Amendment, and so to dismiss their impact and relevance for our society during the 20th Century, or, for that matter, the 21st.

Wilkerson’s book makes readily evident the fallacy inherent in such thinking and assumptions, by demonstrating through the experiences of Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling and Robert Foster the searing impact of the Jim Crow laws on the day-to-day lives of blacks. It is not just that violence happened: we read about an in-law of Ida Mae’s who is nearly beaten to death over a misunderstanding that didn’t even actually involve him. It is not just that black education was poorly funded: we read about Robert’s high school, at which “every few years, a teacher … loaded a band of students onto the flat bed of a pick-up … pulled up to the back entrance of the white high school in town … and began stacking the truck bed with the books the white school was throwing away.” (84) And it’s not just that blacks had to sit in the back of the bus or in certain parts of the train: we read about George Starling moving north and becoming a train porter working on trains going up and down the east coast, and having to lead blacks who had boarded in the north-east free to sit anywhere to segregated cars as the train crossed the Mason-Dixon line into the South.

The hard truth is that these were not events of 150 years ago, or isolated stories; these events happened to people we come to know and care about, and occurred still in the middle of the 20th century, not so very long ago.

And it is finally this --- the recognition of the nearness to our own time and lives more than the events themselves --- becomes the most powerful and affecting part of Wilkerson’s story: the Jim Crow laws and ever-threatening vigilante violence in the South, and the unofficial but still sometimes violently defended discrimination outside the South, happened in the lifetime of Baby Boomers, or the lifetimes of the parents of those born later --- not in some distant past that might allow one to disassociate oneself and one’s understanding of and opinions about modern-day society from it.

Toward the end of the book, Wilkerson summarizes previous work done on the history of black lives in the 20th century, and the migration that so many participated in, recalling that:

Throughout the Migration, social scientists all but concluded that … the Migration had led to the troubles of the urban North and West … blaming the dysfunction of the inner cities on the migrants themselves [who] were cast as poor illiterates who imported out-of-wedlock births, joblessness, and welfare dependency wherever they went.” (528) 

But, she notes:

Newly available census records suggest the opposite to be true. … the migrants were, it turns out … [when] compared to the northern blacks already there … more likely to be married and remain married, more likely to raise their children in two-parent households, and more likely to be employed [and] to earn higher incomes than northern-born blacks even though they were relegated to the lowest-paying positions ... [and] were less likely to be on welfare. (528) 

Wilkerson’s book plays an important role in explaining this more accurate understanding of our past, and its impact on our present --- the on-going “problem of the color-line.”

Through her work, it becomes evident that the roots of the decay that struck major American cities in the second half of the 20th century are not to be found in some inherent personal failing of the migrants themselves, but rather in the social and economic milieu they encountered in the cities of the North and West they migrated to. Boxed into limited parts of the city that did not contain sufficient housing, they often paid more for places than the whites who had moved out, to landlords who had little incentive to perform maintenance given the captive market that made demand larger than supply. The resulting decay and decline of these neighborhoods became a self-fulfilling prophecy for whites in surrounding areas, who then doubled down on their efforts to exclude blacks from their neighborhoods, with violence if necessary.

These migrants also faced wide-spread discrimination as they looked for work, with many companies unwilling to hire them because of the reactions of existing white employees, leaving them with the lowest paid jobs, and little if any prospect for advancement. Migrants who came out of the South, however, “had experienced such hard times, and were willing to work longer hours or second jobs in positions that few northern blacks, or hardly anyone else for that matter wanted.” (528)

Thus by dint of their hardscrabble pasts --- and a powerful pride that would not let them return as failures to their family and friends back home --- they found ways to succeed despite the many challenges. And though many saw their children struggle to escape the destructive impacts of discrimination in their new cities, some climbed out of the enforced poverty to find great success --- with their children even becoming, as Wilkerson points out, political leaders in their hometowns.

In The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson succeeds brilliantly in giving us an intimate look at a critical period in American history, one that transformed the entire country as it unfolded over the middle half of the 20th Century. By choosing characters who came from three different states and circumstances in the South, and who each migrated in different decades to different parts of the U.S., Wilkerson provides a flavor of the variety of experiences of the many millions who joined in this Great Migration, and in so doing, makes personal for the reader not only the details of this history, but the deep ties it has to the issues and challenges in our current society.

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A website with pictures of the principals in the book, and additional information, is available at the link here.



On her program On Being, Krista Tippett has an engaging interview with Isabel Wilkerson. I recommend both the unedited and edited versions, which are available as podcasts at the link at the right.


The challenges and discrimination that Wilkerson describes blacks facing in the area of housing are summarized in a New York Times editorial, Blacks Still Face a Red Line on Housing, which charts the origins and history of red lining, and carries the story forward to the present day.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf