Cosmicomics

"In many ways this book is like those disaster Hollywood films that are so popular today like The Day After Tomorrow or The Core , which take compelling scientific ideas and morph the timescales to that of human experience. In the films, directors always try to make the catastrophe as real as possible, and in the process lose the charm and wonder to ridiculousness. In Cosmicomics Calvino also takes huge and relevant scientific ideas, transmutes time, and describes spectacular geological and astrophysical processes through the senses of the intrepid protagonist Qfwfq. But, rather than aiming for the false realism of Hollywood, Calvino lets the stories develop like fables or memories, always leaving me unbearably fascinated by the scientific idea, like a child getting read a bedtime story. When I read this book for the first time in high school, I remember being absolutely astounded that the moon used to be closer to Earth. Of course people did not paddle boats out to the rising full moon and climb on to the scaly milky surface with a ladder like Calvino described in his book, but this fantasy inspired me to study the natural world, and in a more direct way, inspired my work on tidal rhythmites and history of the Earth-moon orbit. Well, the moon story is the one that stuck with me the longest. I think it is the first one in the book. All I remember thinking when I read the story is, why is he saying the moon needs to be closer to Earth? And, of course, it was never that close, but remarkably it turns out that with every single day, the moon raises a tide on Earth, and the moon actually moves incrementally further and further away from Earth through a transfer of angular momentum. And this tidal dissipation has been happening throughout geologic history. This idea was fascinating and really inspiring so I thought, I wonder if there is a way to study the history of Earth’s orbit. By the time I was in graduate school I discovered there is type of rock that records layers of sediments whose thickness depends on the strength of the tide. These rocks help me to work out the history of the moon and at what rates it has moved away from Earth. There is one really interesting result – you can shoot a laser at the moon to see how fast the moon is moving away from Earth and it turns out it is going way too fast (the current rate would predict an Earth-Moon collision that would melt Earth 600 million years ago, right while animals were evolving!). So then we wonder what’s wrong with this calculation; we realise that the efficiency of tidal dissipation can change through time as a function of climate and paleogeography. In other words, these geological records of the Earth-Moon orbit may actually record information about the geometry of ancient continents and the duration of ancient ice ages!"

"Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino. It’s a series of short stories , or a novel really. But he’s doing something that no other novelist has ever done. He looks at the history of the universe, the history of life on Earth – all the major milestones – and he makes it human. Nobody’s ever done this. I just think it’s a unique book. What do you do if you want to know fundamental things about the universe? Textbooks are dry. A lot of popular science is also dry. But here’s a guy who’s written something entertaining and funny and accessible. It’s a great place to start."