Product Description
Part scientific detective story, part planetary science text and part physics lesson by subterfuge, Surendra Verma waltzes the reader through the process of scientific debate' Guardian.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 3 reviews)

well written, but questionable integrity

the first two-thirds of this book is well written. mr. verma offers a variety of theories on the tunguska incident. the book is well researched from a scientific point of view. where the book falls apart for me, is in the alternative theory section which he labels x-files. here mr. verma ridicules and basically insults any ufo type of explanation. to know where mr. verma is coming from, he gives the history of roswell in a page and a half, concluding it was a weather balloon with dummies. clearly, in my opinion, mr. verma threw the baby, bathwater and tub out in his research. and as anyone should know, debunkers of any theory use ridicule first. so, if you are a right-winged conservative, scientific purist, this book is for you, and should be on your shelf. if you're looking for a book that objectively looks at all theories in a balanced, well-respected manner, skip this book. mr. verma has his biased agenda and presents it well. the tunguska topic is interesting and i look forward to reading more interesting books on it.
June 09, 2008

The Fire Next Time

In the early morning of June 30, 1908, a fireball flew across the Siberian sky and exploded in a 15 megaton blast that flattened 2,150 acres of Siberian forest. In the years that followed, scientists correlated atmospheric pressure readings, reports of unusually bright sunsets and "night glows" in the skies over northern Europe, recordings of seismic waves, and eyewitness accounts, concluding that the cause was probably a stony asteroid that entered the earth's atmosphere and broke up explosively 8 kilometers above the Earth at 7:14 am local time.

Verma's story doesn't end there, of course, or "The Tunguska Fireball" would be a fairly short book. As it is, Verma uses the Tunguska event to embark on an entertaining discussion of how scientists came to understand what had probably happened in the skies over Siberia. The investigations into this remote area were difficult and the findings yielded many interesting theories, ranging from fairly plausible ideas about the arrival of a stony asteroid or comet, to more exotic hypotheses involving black holes, antimatter, mirror matter, volcanoes, ball lightning, and "geometeors," to really bizarre notions about crippled alien spaceships, laser beams from other planets and death rays secretly invented by Nikola Tesla (really). The Tunguska event offers a great excuse to digress among a number of interesting ideas, although I confess that I find Verma's explanations of the underlying science to be a tad murky at times.

When the dust settles (so to speak), I'll place my bets on the stony asteroid theory, with a sentimental vote for the killer comet--the other hypotheses seem to require too much special pleading to be a compelling way to think about the event, at least based on the information we have in hand today. That said, the most sobering revelation in Verma's book is his report of the "mini-Tunguska" event of September 24, 2002. A US satellite spotted an object that entered the earth's atmosphere, but lost it as it fell below 30 kilometers; a few moments later, another satellite reported a fireball exploding in the cloudy skies above Siberia. The explosion flattened 100 square kilometers of forest with the energy of a small atomic bomb, but no one witnessed the fireball and, as far as we know, no one was killed or injured. The story would have been very different if the object, whatever it was, had exploded above a populated area.

Verma's books makes entertaining and sobering reading. "The Tunguska Fireball" will make you wonder how many more objects are floating around in the void with Earth's name on them.
March 18, 2007

The Tunguska Fireball (by S. Verma)

I thought that the Tunguska event had been solved a number of years ago. It is clear from this book that it is not. The author has done a commendable job of presenting the history of the Tunguska devastation in 1908 and of the work that has been done since then in trying to identify what caused it. Theories abound, from the plausible, i.e., a comet or asteroid, to the absurd, e.g., an alien spaceship. This author writes extremely well and weaves a most intriguing yarn - at times funny, at times tongue-in-cheek, mostly serious but always absolutely fascinating. This is a great book that is impossible to put down. I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in whodunits or scientific mysteries.
May 06, 2005

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